We're Never Going Back
What started out as a campaign slogan has become a reality that is as terrifying as it is full of promise for something so much better
On November 1, 2024, I wore a shirt that said, “We’re not going back, like ever,” to the Taylor Swift Eras Tour in Indianapolis. I got a lot of compliments. That night made me hopeful for a new era of moving forward as a country. Tens of thousands of women of all ages (and the men who love them) sang and celebrated and expressed optimism about the future.
That optimism would be dashed only a few days later as the election returns came in on November 5.
In the first half of 2025, it has felt like all we are doing is going backward. Vaccine boards and research abolished. Green energy initiatives rolled back. Immigrants and citizens disappearing off the streets. Farms with crops left to rot. School funding cut. Comedians cancelled for speaking out against the president. Women dying or losing fertility from pregnancy complications because abolitionist abortion laws have made their doctors skittish to pursue quick treatment. Threats to take away gay marriage. Loss of benefits for trans military veterans. It has been one thing after another. We barely have time to process one rollback on progress or threat to Constitutional rights before another one pops up on our news feed. It’s been frightening, maddening, and frustrating, often all at the same time.
All of this pain, frustration, and uncertainty because some of our fellow citizens became convinced that we needed to return to the past. That we need to make America great again. That there was some magical time in our nation’s history when the country was truly a great place for everyone to live, and we could recapture that mythical past with the right politicians and laws and by getting rid of those who got in the way.
Humans view the past with rose-colored glasses. We always have. While trauma may stick with us and resurface when we least expect it, survival demands that we bury pain and remember the good. We want to remember the positive and avoid discussing the potential negatives. This is why 80s kids fondly remember drinking from the outdoor hose and staying out until dark without telling our parents where we were. Never mind the lead exposure and many warnings about missing children with faces plastered on milk cartons and the bulletin boards of the local grocery store. Our grandparents told us stories of putting our infant parents into baskets instead of car seats and throwing out their arms to protect their children and keep them from flying out of cars during fender benders. We even forget that smoking bans in public places are a relatively new development, the non-smoking sections of restaurants a fading memory.
Most pregnant women are told they will forget the pain of childbirth once their children are born because they will be so happy and relieved to see their little ones.
And that is mostly true. Even for the most traumatic birth stories, the memory of the actual pain from birthing a child fades. Other pieces of the story remain and often play a role in the decisions women make about future pregnancies, but the pain? There are new struggles, new challenges, and the need to protect the new little one that take up our energy instead.
Just as it is with individual humans, so it is with history. For the longest time, Americans were raised on the stories of unparalleled heroism and innovation. Choosing revolution was a risky act of treason that could have gone terribly wrong. The “American Experiment” formed a democratic system that the world had never seen before. Westward expansion showed the world what could be done with a far-reaching railroad system. The automobile revolutionized transportation. With US involvement in WWI and WWII, we became the leaders of the free world. While Europe rebuilt in the aftermath of two devastating wars, Americans experienced new prosperity and government investment in American lives. We built a coast-to-coast highway system, suburbs, and witnessed a rising middle class.
But we also built colonies and a young America on the backs of enslaved people. We pushed out the original inhabitants and committed genocide to obtain new lands. We entrapped Chinese people into a new form of slavery to build our expansive railway system. Automobiles cleaned up the pollution left by horses, but clouded our skies and, along with the factories producing the stuff making our lives easier, increased the temperature of our planet. We dropped two atomic bombs, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and destroying two cities. Our highway system divided communities, locking minority neighborhoods into poverty and drawing red lines on maps to prevent non-white citizens from buying into new, safe suburban neighborhoods.
So many of the steps we’ve taken as a country to make lives better have been a step on the backs of those without the power to fight for their own place at the table. And when people have won the right to have their voices heard, it’s come with tremendous blowback. Reconstruction gave Black citizens representation in government and started to transform Southern economies, until white men in white hoods started terrorizing the countryside and brought Reconstruction to an end. Teddy Roosevelt and his reformers ended child labor and fought for the rights of working people. But the wealthy increased their power in the 1920s and brought the economy crashing down in 1929. FDR put into place social safety nets that brought our country out of the Great Depression and set us up to assist a devastated Europe during WWII. But after Eisenhauer, a small group of conservatives worked to grow their power and influence, using the last sixty years to chip away at those protections in favor of helping Big Business. Brown vs. Board of Education finally gave non-white citizens educational opportunities that had been denied them since the nation’s founding, but conservative action groups started organizing to fight for the “rights” of their white children to continue to live separate lives. The Voting Rights Act finally gave equal voice to all citizens, but those protections have been slowly chipped away by conservative courts, with the last remaining protections threatened. This is happening while Republican governors threaten dramatic gerrymanders that will silence all but the mostly conservative, mostly white voices in their states.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
When people chanted “We’re not going back,” at Harris rallies in the fall of 2024, they feared everything that has happened since January 2025, but most of us didn’t realize so much would happen so fast. Many of us were driven by both fear of the destructive path to come and hope for something new and better. We wanted to look forward, not backward. We saw potential for a bright future that built on the lessons of the past.
Because, while our nation’s past may be full of complicated stories that make us question our heroes, it is also full of stories of progress in the wake of destruction.
Many of our friends, family, and neighbors who chose our current path did so believing that a return to the old would give us the best chance moving forward. They had forgotten the lessons from the past, or they were learning the wrong ones. They forgot a world with choking air pollution and rivers literally burning because of trash and chemicals. They forgot the people who were hurt in factories before OSHA came along to ensure employees were protected. They forgot what life was like for everyone before the ADA insisted on elevators and sidewalk ramps for everyone to use and enjoy.
They forgot because most of us don’t know. We didn’t live those horrors. We live in a world built after those changes were put into place to protect us and our children.
And we don’t want to go back.
But I also refuse to be someone who says “everything was fine before.”
Education was and is a mess.
Our healthcare system was and is a mess.
We don’t have enough housing and the housing we have is too expensive.
I don’t know how my kids’ college educations are going to be paid for.
Our lakes and rivers and air are still too polluted, and climate change is increasing instances of algae and other organisms that make our waterways unusable.
We are in need of more reforms across every section of American life than one person can understand in a lifetime.
We need a plan for the present we have and the future we want to have, because the past we think we remember never existed, and the world we live in now holds its own unique challenges.
We can’t go back, but even if we could, I wouldn’t want to. I want to look forward, not back. I want to dream of possibilities and face challenges head on, not stick with the same old methods that have been proven not to work. I want to prove that humans are resilient, that we are capable of imagination and innovation and that we can do hard things.
And I want to believe that it isn’t too late.
Note: I keep looking for positive news within all of the “bad.” This podcast episode really helped me see that not all is lost with climate change action, but we have to find more ways to make meaningful impacts on our communities.
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Amazing as always Sarah. Keeps me grounded.
Well said ❤️