This is the most despairing hour of my prematurely graying lifetime. But it is also the most hopeful. I want to put in thread form a @BBC radio essay I did saying why. (It’s what I discussed on @Morning_Joe today.)

It is a case for hope in the darkness.

You and I live in a grim time. But it is a special kind of grim time that happens every so often in history: a grim time pregnant with hope.

What I see in my country, America, is an old society dying and a new society panging to be born.

With the birth of a child, you pray. But with the birth of a new country, you choose. We must choose the next country.

They say it is easier to see things with 20/20 hindsight. But when we look back on this time, we may remember the terrible year that gave us 2020 foresight instead.

A year that allowed us to see, more clearly than before, what we were allowing ourselves to become — and to choose other roads and other songs.

America is living not through one crisis but at least five.

The pandemic and the already unhealthy host society the virus attacked.

The employment crisis unleashed by that pandemic that pushed our inequitable economy from chronically ill to terminally diseased.

The racial crisis fueled by police barbarism and institutionalized hatred.

The democratic crisis embodied, but hardly initiated, by a mad demagogue in the highest office in the land, who behaves more and more like a fascist.

And the environmental crisis, hovering over the others, threatening everything that breathes.

These are distinct crises. But they intersect with each other.

The pandemic wouldn’t have killed so many if, early on, more people in America could have taken a day of paid sick leave when they felt unwell.

The democratic crisis is the fruit of many white people preferring to surrender the rule of law and decency than to lose their own privileges.

The climate crisis is what it is because the democracy is in no position to do anything.

The cries of “Black Lives Matter” are a response to police abuses, but they speak as well of a virus that took far more Black lives than white lives as a percent of the population.

It can be depressing and intimidating to see the crises this way.

But then I think that, were it not for the enormity, and simultaneity, of these crises, we would never escape them.

These synced crises have freed us from any illusion that we may have been living right. They make plain that we will either transform our way of life, or we will decline and fall — as Americans, and possibly as a species.

They have given us a strange gift: the knowledge that return, going back to normal, is impossible, that our choices are imagination or death.

So now we see the future with 2020 foresight.

It is plain as day now that the capitalism we were practicing would soon have destroyed us.

Plain as day that America will never be whole so long as white domination is the law and the culture.

It is plain now that any of us is only as healthy as the most precariously insured, least-well-tended member of the society.

It is plain that a society built on extraction from the planet will eventually extract us, too.

Plain that oligarchy is still oligarchy and feudalism is still feudalism, even when they are reincarnated with corporate social responsibility, philanthropy, and woke social-media posts.

Imagining and building and organizing and electing this new society into being is the work of our time. It is not easy work, for the faint of heart.

But with 2020 foresight, we can see that another way of life, another social order, another way of relating to each other, another way of living with and on our planet, another way of judging what matters — that these things glimmer on the horizon.

With 2020 foresight, let us march toward these things.

And if you prefer audio, here it is. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p08j4ct0?at_custom3=BBC+World+Service&at_medium=custom7&at_campaign=64&at_custom4=817C21C6-BA28-11EA-B4CF-668396E8478F&at_custom2=twitter&at_custom1=%5Bpost+type%5D