April 2032: Ellijay
Hello and welcome to Letters From The Future.
I’ve always enjoyed the American travelogue in the style of Charles Kuralt or Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley. But those guys are from another time. I wanted to hear the modern, progressive, inclusive version of their stories from the road. So I decided to create them myself.
One day, I hope to hit the road for real and find these stories in nonfiction mode. Prince wrote songs about Paisley Park before he built it. That’s how creativity works.
What is The Third Reconstruction?
The original Reconstruction was the time immediately after the Civil War when the federal government worked to support the newly freed Black people who had been enslaved in the former Confederate states. It didn’t end well, for a whole bunch of reasons, and gave way to the Jim Crow era in the South.
Fast forward to the 1950s. Some historians say that the Civil Rights Movement, which hit its peak in the ‘50s and ‘60s, represented a Second Reconstruction. Once again, the federal government got directly involved in breaking up the structures of white supremacy. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, aimed to get rid of discrimination on the basis of race. The idea of The Third Reconstruction is that we need to have another go at finally getting this right. The Rev. Dr. William Barber wrote the book on the subject. He says:
“We must have a Third Reconstruction. We must address the five interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation/denial of health care, the war economy, and the false moral narrative of religious nationalism. These are breaches that must be addressed, and according to the text, repairing the breaches will bring revival. … No, America has never yet been all that she has hoped to be. But right here, right now, a Third Reconstruction is possible if we choose.“
How did it finally happen?
To get to The Third Reconstruction, it was necessary to clear a path out of the political stall that dogged us at the federal level in the early 2020s. The Great Unlocking was a series of events that played out over that decade. There wasn’t a grand design from the beginning as it happened - in fact, there was a series of choices and trade-offs that people made for selfish reasons at the time. They just happened to create the conditions for meaningful change.
I’ll explain more in the coming months, but for now let’s just say that in 2032, when LFTF begins, you have more political parties, more people in Congress, and more voters than we do right now. Mix all of those factors together, and you get national leadership that is more in tune with people’s needs than we have seen in a long time.
So excited to be a part of my friend’s project, Letters from the Future.
Follow their blog to see their initiative & creations from artists around the US!
