As I start writing this, it’s 6:06 a.m. I’ve been at my computer since 4:37am, buzzing between emails and updating our website, filling in my calendar with Zoom meetings and rearranging the sticky notes that line my computer monitor as the reminders on some are satisfied and new to-dos flash through my mind.
My mornings have looked a lot like this for a month and a half – just scrambling to pack in as much work as possible before my boys wake up and the day turns into an hours-long stretch of e-learning, meal planning, and fighting to limit screen time. It. Is. Exhausting. And yet, I know that I am one of the very, very lucky ones, and “grateful” does not begin to capture how I feel. So I pour my second cup of coffee and keep going…
Despite the unbelievably, almost paralyzingly strange times we’re living in, April was a busy month at RSF.
If you keep a regular eye on us you’ve probably noticed we’ve been putting out a lot of pandemic-related content. Heck, this whole issue of the newsletter is about COVID-19 and the “economic vaccine” we believe will not only position us to fight its effects on our economy, but will increase the nation’s overall economic health, helping to make us immune to future economic illness (to take the analogy just a little too far).
Why now? Why not continue to “hunker down” as I wrote last month? Because we are experiencing a singular moment in history, an unprecedented reckoning after decades of poor decision making left us with shocking divides between the haves and have nots, a mindset that pits our environmental health against our fiscal health, and seemingly insurmountable (and growing) national debt.
In short, now is the time for RSF to lean in. To lean in with our message of sound economic policies. To lean in with our message of equity. To lean in with our foundational understanding of what it means to be human, what it means to be a part of this beautiful, ever-changing, sometimes scary experiment we call society.
As other, wiser people than me have already noted, COVID-19 is a horrific disease, but the true horror is how fully it has exposed the ugly injustices that permeate American society. It has laid our class divides plain before our eyes, and now we have a choice: we can turn our heads from the ugliness and run as fast as we can back to our old normal, or we can look with unwavering eyes and set to work fixing it, to creating balance.
At RSF we are committed to the latter. We will throw our weight behind the creation of economic equity, behind the articulation and realization of an economic vaccine that will strengthen our society in good times, and make us that much better able to survive, even thrive, in bad times.
I invite you to join us in this fight. Share our materials. Speak out about the need for economic reforms. Write your thoughts down and share them with us and anyone else who’ll hear you. If ever our ideas could get a fair hearing it is now. Let’s find our voice and speak our truth, together.
