Change Has Already Come...

Barbara Kingsolver said in a 2008 commencement address, “The arc of history is longer than human vision. It bends. We abolished slavery, we granted universal suffrage. We have done hard things before. And every time it took a terrible fight between people who could not imagine changing the rules, and those who said, ‘We already did. We have made the world new.’”  


I've never looked at conflict from that perspective--we're not fighting to change, we're fighting because change has already happened.  That certainly holds true in church conflict.  I am wondering about the current political impasse--have we remade out world in such ideological hard-line stances on both sides that we can no longer govern effectively?  Or have we remade the world with 24 hour news cycles in a way that grinds the ability of our legislators to be friends and work together to nothing--allowing no space for conversation or relationship, only political position and sound bites.


I think I want "we have made the world new" to only be a good thing.  A new world should be more positive...work better.  A new world should bring life and health to all.  A new world should welcome people in.  But I think the reality of "we have made the world new" in everyday life (as opposed to eons or ages) is that much of our new is not good.  Is it good that our national debt is so high?  Is it good that jobs are cut during the tenuous effort to rebuild an economy?  Is it good that so much of our country's wealth is located in the hands of so few?  Is it good that fewer and fewer people are interested in and connected to faith?  I'm understanding that we can't even really make the decisions on those issues--good or bad.  The change has already come...now we're talking about it.  Now we're fighting about it.


The arc of history is what I place in God's hand.  I have to know that somehow, with God's work through us, that we are moving in the right direction.  I do see that really long-term progress.  But I wonder how our decision-making might be affected if we understand that the "new world" is already here.  It's always hard to vision a new thing.  If we are not trying to stop change that has, in fact, already happened, might we vision better?  If we understand that change has already come, is here right now, can we stop our fighting?