The ancient Greeks had a word for the moment when a human being can exert energy and move the cosmos. That word was kairos.
Kairos is the point in time when all the currents flowing from the past into the present converge into a single wave of enormous power.
The question for human beings is, Can we recognize that moment and ride the tide so that it raises us up and ferries us into a successful future? If we don’t, that same power will crash over us and flow on, leaving us wallowing in stagnant pools full of muck and disease.
As usual, Shakespeare described kairos in perfect poetry:
There is a tide in the affairs of men Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. (Julius Caesar, 4.2.270-73)
Decent America is now facing such a moment. All the currents of American history are converging on a critical moment. If we make one simple move we can launch our boats atop the wave.
Uncharacteristically for kairos—which is usually difficult to perceive through the welter of historical forces, personal motivations, and intransigent human ignorance—this coming moment is not only perfectly clear, but we even know exactly when it will arrive.
On top of that, we also know precisely what we have to do to launch our boats in the right direction.
The date is November 8, and the direction is away from the Republican hordes.
If Decent America can just clear its vision, look through the distracting films of the economy, the Republican disinformation, the sensationalism of Trump and his minions—the course could not be clearer.
The one simple thing we must do on November 8 to meet this looming kairos is mete out a decisive defeat to Republicans for their craven subjection to the lust for power.
True, we will have to buck the so-called historical trends that, we are told, punish incumbents in mid-term elections.
But people are capable of overcoming such historical trends at any moment. You are not compelled to eat that second piece of cake just because up till now you always have.
If you stand up and walk away from the table, you have overcome the historical trend. Just like that.
Decent America must do the same. We have to look the historical trend square in the face and say, “Not this time.”
Sometimes the force of kairos is so potent that the simplest of choices on our part can be amplified a thousandfold.
Indeed this coming moment of kairos is so fraught that a simple nudge—one refusal to go along with the trend—will instantly dispel the autocratic nightmare that Republicans are openly promising to inflict on the last best hope of earth.
On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures. (Julius Caesar, 4.2.274–76.)
All we have to do is vote against Republicans. Everywhere, for every office.
Prevent them from regaining control of Congress, and all their malefic energy will come to nothing. They will continue to stew in their self-boiling hatred and torpid anger.
Give Democrats control of Congress, and Decent America can spend the next two years stopping all Republican efforts to destroy democracy. And demonstrating to the satisfaction of all but the most deluded Trumpists that the entire Republican Party is a lunatic cult that cannot play any role in our future politics.
Leap atop the tide of kairos, buck the historical trend, turn Congress over to the Democrats—and democracy endures.
Don’t do that, and the American experiment perishes, gasping its last breaths in the infective fens of “conservatism.”
Easy choice, easy action. No?