Shift Change

When I look back over my life, I realize I’ve spent a lot of it watching ordinary people do extraordinary things.

When I was a little boy growing up in Connecticut in the 1960s, I went with my friends to Vietnam War moratoriums.

I was ten years old.

I didn’t understand geopolitics.

I didn’t understand Washington.

Hell, I probably couldn’t have found Vietnam on a map.

But I understood what I was seeing.

People were standing up.

People were questioning their government.

People were saying:

We want something different.

The antiwar movement became enormous. Millions of Americans participated over the years, public opinion changed, and ordinary citizens demonstrated that they could put tremendous pressure on the people running their country.

And little ten-year-old me learned something without realizing I was learning it:

Ordinary people have power when they come together.

Then in 1969, my family moved to Texas.

And suddenly I’m living practically across the street from NASA.

Everybody in my neighborhood seemed to be working toward the same mission:

Put a man on the moon.

Engineers.

Scientists.

Technicians.

Contractors.

Astronauts.

Secretaries.

Mechanics.

Computer programmers.

Regular people getting up in the morning, drinking their coffee, kissing their families goodbye and heading off to work.

Except their job was to accomplish something humanity had never accomplished before.

Think about how fucking crazy that idea was.

We’re going to build a giant rocket.

Put three human beings on top of it.

Fill the thing with explosive fuel.

Blast them 240,000 miles through space.

Land two of them on the moon.

Bring them back off the moon.

Meet the other guy flying around up there.

And somehow get everybody safely back to Earth.

Sure.

No problem.

Except they did it.

Human beings walked on the moon.

And I learned another lesson:

Sometimes “impossible” just means we haven’t figured it out yet.

Then decades later, I found myself living in Greensboro, North Carolina.

And I learned about four freshmen from North Carolina A&T.

February 1, 1960.

Ezell Blair Jr.

Franklin McCain.

Joseph McNeil.

David Richmond.

Four young Black men walked into Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro and sat down at a segregated lunch counter.

They didn’t have political power.

They didn’t have millions of dollars.

They didn’t have consultants.

They didn’t have lobbyists.

They didn’t have TikTok.

They didn’t have a fucking podcast.

They had four chairs.

And they sat down.

The next day, more students came.

Then more.

The idea spread across the South.

Those four ordinary young men helped ignite a sit-in movement involving tens of thousands of people, part of the larger civil-rights struggle that ultimately transformed American law and society.

And that taught me another lesson:

You don’t need millions of people to start something.

Sometimes you need four.

Sometimes you need one.

And now, at 69 years old, I’m beginning to understand why those stories have stayed with me.

Because today it’s our turn.

Nearly 250 years ago, America began with one of the most extraordinary promises ever written:

“All men are created equal.”

And then we proceeded to build a country that didn’t actually live up to it.

Not even close.

Slavery existed.

Women couldn’t vote.

Black Americans were denied fundamental rights.

Native Americans suffered dispossession and violence.

Generation after generation has had to fight to expand the meaning of those original words.

And that’s when something finally clicked for me.

America was never finished.

It still isn’t.

And maybe it never should be.

America isn’t a monument.

America is a construction project.

Every generation gets the keys to the job site for a little while.

We inherit whatever the people before us built.

Some of it is magnificent.

Some of it is outdated.

Some of it is broken.

And some of it should have never been built in the first place.

So we get to work.

We preserve what’s good.

We repair what’s broken.

We tear out what doesn’t work anymore.

And we add something new.

That’s our responsibility.

Not to finish America.

Not to make everybody think alike.

Not to eliminate disagreement.

Hell, disagreement is part of democracy.

Our job is simply to leave the place a little better than we found it.

A little freer.

A little fairer.

A little more equal.

A little more accessible.

A little more compassionate.

A little closer to that extraordinary promise written almost 250 years ago.

And for the first time in human history, we have tools that allow ordinary people to connect almost instantly.

We have the accumulated knowledge of humanity sitting in our pockets.

We have technology.

We have artificial intelligence.

We have the ability to talk to somebody on the other side of the planet in seconds.

But the greatest resource we have isn’t technology.

It’s each other.

That’s what I’ve discovered.

Talk to people.

Talk to strangers.

Listen.

Ask questions.

Find out what somebody else’s life actually looks like before deciding who they are.

Because underneath all the labels, we’re human beings trying to build lives.

And when human beings work together, occasionally something extraordinary happens.

Four students sit down at a lunch counter.

Thousands of people build a machine that takes humanity to another world.

Millions of citizens stand up and demand that their government listen.

And sometimes history moves.

I started this book with a boy who thought he could fly.

For most of my life, I figured that little boy was just dreaming.

Now I’m not so sure.

Because I’ve watched human beings fly.

I’ve watched them walk on the moon.

I’ve watched ordinary people challenge injustice.

And I’ve watched ideas that once sounded impossible become reality.

So at 69 years old, I don’t want to sit in the stands and watch anymore.

I want to build.

I want to create.

I want to listen.

I want to talk to strangers.

I want to throw ideas into the world and see what happens.

And when my time is over, I don’t need to have finished anything.

I just want to be able to look at the little piece of America that was handed to me and say:

I added something.

Then we hand it to the next generation.

And we tell them:

We didn’t finish it.

We couldn’t.

America isn’t supposed to be finished.

But we moved a few bricks.

We fixed a few things.

We opened a few doors.

We tried to make the promise a little more real.

Now it’s yours.

Do better than we did.

Build something we couldn’t imagine.

Because ordinary people have always changed this country.

We’re ordinary people too.

So pick up a brick.

We’ve got some building to do.