I read this issue in my gap year before law school. I really wish it was being published for the first time now. But it's worth revisiting in any event. There's an article on Medium making the rounds today about what history tells us about Brexit and Trump. It's well written and worth reading. But it leaves me with a couple of thoughts: (1) pattern recognition without proposed solutions is not very helpful - it might get you an A in history class but to succeed as a species we must be in the business of solving problems, not standing idly by while they manifest; (2) it's easy to think of the world as historically deterministic but just 8 years ago this pretty great guy named Barry won the US general election on a campaign of hope, of inclusiveness, of "yes we can". That is not this year's electoral discourse, of course, and that's sad and frustrating and entirely lamentable, but it's important - perhaps most important now more than ever - to remember that things/outcomes can be very different - have in fact been different - and discourses of disunity do not always prevail. We are always able to architect new and better outcomes, so long as we are not deaf to our humanity, our oneness, to love itself. We have the capacity to bridge divides, to tear down echo chambers, to build new, unimagined futures that make visible our democratic potential, our openness to multiple competing truths. We simply have to choose to do so and honour that resolve in every interaction we have with each other, most assertively at the polls, but just as rigorously in the days, months and years in between.
