No going back

 I've been consuming a lot of historical fiction recently, discussing it with other nerds, and all of it points to one thing:

You cannot heal to-first-principles what has been utterly broken. You cannot un-burn a forest. But you can use the ashes as fertilizer to grow something better.

We were talking about Babylon Berlin (which is beautiful and dark and amazingly well done, well worth watching),  and the fall of the Weimar Republic, and I think it has some strong messages for the incoming administration. 

We can immediately reverse policies, but if we blindly put things back to how they were, given the damages done in the world in the intervening time we're going to find perverse incentives in record time and it'll be egg on the face of everyone involved. We should be taking this time to see what stagnant patterns have been torn down by this disaster of a government, of a pandemic, of a year, and see what we can build back, better.

I am heartened that that's the actual campaign title of the incoming Biden administration. We cannot make America great "again" for it was never great. But we can take the things we've lost and use them to fertilize a greater good and a greater equality.