Someday I want to be sitting on a front porch, in a rocking chair, with a nice cool drink on a hot summer afternoon, telling my grandchildren who don't remember it, about how the pandemic of '20 was a turning point.

Why you know the Greenliner train that you took to visit me and grandpa? This country wouldn't have hardly any high speed rail if the People's Pandemic Party hadn't been dreamed up in what felt like a split second and taken over congress in those wild years of the early 2020s.

I doubt AOC would have become vice president and then later president either, if people hadn't seen just how bad the inequality in this country was and organized to do something about it.

And the great strikes of 2021, after the second wave of the pandemic, when all the workers who were safe working from home went on strike until the frontline workers had protective equipment and the unemployed had a basic income guarantee. Nobody predicted that.

The oil companies getting bought up by Greenpeace and the philanthropies and the oil put into perpetual underground trust, that was another twist very few people saw coming, but darn, the price was right, with oil prices crashing, and they went for it.

And, when the media began highlighting the corruption, especially the scandals in which members of one party prolonged the epidemic in order to get rich off their investments in ventilators and masks, well that was the beginning of the new chapter.

.....No one knows, of course, what stories we will be telling. This is, as all moments are, a multi-potential moment.

Complex systems can have punctuated moments of rapid change in response to crisis. Why couldn't this be one of those moments?

I bet the people who made such moments happen in the past were scared and confused and weak and tired and unsure, so why not us? We are all of those things and we have zoom and facetime and 3D printers and podcasts to boot.

Why not one more shapeshifting transformation in history, and why not now?

What story do you think you'll be telling children not yet born about this time? What story do you want to be telling them? And what are you doing about it?