I have been watching this beautiful collective process of change unfold with particular intensity over the past several years-generated by the work of countless people separately and together, by the delegitimization of the past and the hope for a better future that lay behind the genesis of Occupy Wall Street (2011), Idle No More (2012), Black Lives Matter (2013), Standing Rock (2016), #MeToo (2017), and the new feminist surges and insurgencies, immigrant and trans rights movements, the Green New Deal (2018), and the growing power and reach of the climate movement. You can see changes to the ideas about whose rights matter and what is reasonable and who should decide, if you sit still enough and gather the evidence of transformations that happen by a million tiny steps before they result in a landmark legal decision or an election or some other shift that puts us in a place we’ve never been. The unknown becomes known, the outcasts come inside, the strange becomes ordinary.

They remake the world, and they do so mostly by the accretion of small gestures and statements and the embracing of new visions of what can be and should be. The consequences of these transformations are perhaps most important where they are most subtle. The we who inhabits those structures grows as what was once subversive or transgressive settles in as normal, as people outside the walls wake up one day inside them and forget they were ever anywhere else. Though there are individual voices and people who got there first, these are collective projects that matter not when one person says something but when a million integrate it into how they see and act in the world. About race, class, gender, sexuality about nature, power, climate, the interconnectedness of all things about compassion, generosity, collectivity, communion about justice, equality, possibility. They’re assembled from ideas, visions and values emerging out of conversations, essays, editorials, arguments, slogans, social-media messages, books, protests, and demonstrations. We are building something immense together that, though invisible and immaterial, is a structure, one we reside within-or, rather, many overlapping structures.

Rebeccas solnit