History is not an endless loop that just repeats over and over and over. It's not a spiral, where nothing is the same but everything rhymes. History is not a set of facts you can write down in a notebook and consult and know The Truth About What Happened. History is a battle.

This is not 1968 or 1930 something or the 1920s or 1918 or 1832 or 1807 or 1789 or 1358 or whatever date you have in mind. It's not like that. It's not some neat situation we can sit in on and say, "Oh, this has happened before, here's what will come next."

What history can tell you is that racists don't stop being racist, they just change the rhetorical strategies they use to promote racism and the legislative and political means they use to impose it. That culture and society change slowly, and the autocratic impulses of a

polity don't change nearly as quickly. That the "old guard," whatever they happen to be, do not let go of power nicely and easily and peacefully, and it has to be taken from them--and even then they will fight back bitterly.

It teaches us that people have incredible power if they focus and show up and march and protest and fight. And that no army or security force or organization is monolithic, and when told to attack fellow citizens, not every soldier or cop or guard says yes.

It shows that civil wars are bad, that revolutions are bloody, and that autocrats must be fought every step of the way.

History will show you that people can surprise you. That nothing is fixed. That the odds change suddenly. That chaos and free will exist and reign supreme.

I don't know what will happen tonight. Or tomorrow. Or next week. Or next year. There is no historian who does. Or politician. Or soothsayer.

History is what people do. History is whatever we make it. And then whatever is written of it. And whatever is remembered.

I don't want the narrative of the United States to be a violent, brutal, racist, genocidal republic that rose to prominence in the 20th century and collapsed in the 21st because it never attempted to overcome the twin sins of indigenous genocide and slavery.

We've had days of massive protests in cities across the country. Sustained, massive, protests against institutions that are meant to protect the people that instead have been used to kill the marginalized with impunity. Protests so large that the President of the United States,

who is the bastion of that vilest branch of the old guard of America, the scion of its white supremacists and its fascists and its fundamentalists, has to threaten to bring the military to bear.

I know we can despair.

But he's afraid. They are all afraid.

They're afraid because, if I were the kind of historian who were going to pretend that my over-specialized knowledge of a certain time gave me some insight into the future--and I'm not--this is the way rotten structures fall, and real change is pushed through.

And that real change is terrifying to people whose entire way of life is based on oppression--not the oppression of white privilege, which too must die, but overt white supremacy via the police and the military and the courts and the prisons.

And I'd say, if I were that kind of historian, that sometimes things actually do get better. That nihilism has rarely been proven true in the long term.

As Theodore Parker said in his 1853 sermon "Of Justice and Conscience,"

"Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight;

I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice."

The arc is long. Longer than it should be, longer than is right or good. But I believe his words.

Theodore Parker would not have us wait around for it to occur. He supported John Brown as a member of the Secret Six, denounced the Mexican-American War, wrote the scathing To a Southern Slave-Holder ( https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/To_a_Southern_Slaveholder) in 1848, advocated violating the Fugitive Slave Act,

and in the final year of his life wrote a defense of John Brown's raid.

I can only hope Parker was right when he wrote "Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Jefferson trembled when he thought of slavery and remembered that God is just. Ere long all America will tremble."