Friends,
When I was very young and frustrated about one thing or another, my mother reassured me that “everything works out in the end.”
Her optimism used to drive me nuts. “When is the end?” I’d ask her. “Next week? Next year? After we die? In a century? What are we supposed to do in the meantime? Just wait?”
My mother’s words come back to me, partly because it’s Mother’s Day.
They also come back to me because of the horrible setbacks of the last two weeks — the Supreme Court’s gutting of what remained of the Voting Rights Act; the headlong rush of Louisiana, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi to resurrect Jim Crow redistricting laws; and the Virginia Supreme Court’s invalidation of Virginia’s redistricting plan. All of this — combined with Trump’s war in Iran, his ongoing ICE police state inside America, and his innumerable attacks on the Constitution — has reminded me of my mother’s optimism.
I thought I had seen this country at its worst. I lived through Joe McCarthy, George Wallace, Bull Connor, and Richard Nixon. The Ku Klux Klan murdered a dear man who had protected me from bullies when I was a child. The Vietnam War took the life of a good friend from college. Watergate undermined much of my generation’s faith in government.
But what we’re now experiencing is in many ways worse, because the Supreme Court, the Republican Party, and Trump are destroying laws and institutions that had been painstakingly enacted and implemented to protect our democracy, defend against bigotry, and strengthen the rule of law. We had not achieved these goals, of course, but at least we’d used these laws and institutions to seek them. That effort was the foundation of my mother’s optimism, which became my own.
Yet the people now in power are no longer fighting for a good society. They are pursuing a cruel, regressive society. So where does this leave the rest of us?
Like many of you, I’m furious about the wanton destruction of so much I’ve believed in and worked for. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to give up the fight.
Over the years, I’ve come to understand my mother’s optimism. Many important social goals require working hard for them, but not expecting them to be achieved anytime soon — in fact, accepting that there will be times when we seem to be going backwards, and that the goals may not even be achieved in our lifetimes. Yet seeking them is essential for our lives to matter. As Martin Luther King Jr. assured us, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
I admit to occasional bouts of pessimism. But pessimism is different from cynicism. Pessimism is a sense that things will worsen, at least in the foreseeable future. Pessimism is understandable at a time like this. Even my optimistic mother, were she still with us and witnessing what’s happening, might succumb to it on bad days.
Cynicism is a belief that the worsening is inevitable and that nothing we can do will make any difference. Cynicism is a black hole from which there’s no escape. It’s the end of the line.
Powerful reactionary forces want us to embrace cynicism because then they win everything; they can take it all without a fight.
If you occasionally feel pessimistic, you’re not alone. But please do not fall into cynicism.
Happy Mother’s Day to all of you who are mothers, and to the mothers of all of you. And believe me: If we continue to seek social justice, everything will work out in the end.
Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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