Heather Cox Richardson

No, but, you know, that's one of the things that makes the United States so cool is that in many ways we act out humanity.

You know, you're always going to have those people who want to control others.

You just are because humans are going to human.

But –

There you go.

It's my next career.

Yeah.

But you also have human beings trying to do what is right, not just for other people, but also for themselves.

And when you think about this moment and its parallels to the American founding or to the other periods in which there have been those trying to literally get rid of human equality in the case of the elite enslavers who put together the Confederacy or the

the robber barons in the 1890s or those looking to create an international business system in the 1920s that created, you know, large pools of labor.

When you think about that and you think about Americans kind of looking at each other and going, hey, you know, I disagree with you about finances or immigration or internal improvements or whatever.

But I can agree with you that we need to control our own destinies.

In the past, that has always won and come out stronger for these moments.

So for as frustrating as this moment is in so many ways and as depressing as it is in so many ways, one of the things that you can take to the bank is the idea that it might make us stronger again

and renew our faith in those American principles that led those colonists to throw off the greatest empire at the time in the world, a seemingly impossible task that they did.

And then to sit down, young men all, by the way, we talk about them as the founding fathers.

They were barely old enough to be fathers to write a system that worked and has worked for almost 250 years.

Kind of cool to be part of that whole system.

history and that trajectory through our past.

So that at least is a way to look forward to these next really rough weeks and the next rough years and think, you know, maybe we're given the opportunity to do our own part.