America will bounce back. It has before.

If stagnant wages, near-record inequality, climate change, nuclear buildups, assault weapons, mass killings, trade wars, opioid deaths, Russian intrusions into American elections, kids locked in cages at our border, and Donald Trump in the White House don’t at least occasionally cause you feelings of impending doom, you’re not human.

But I want you to remember this: As bad as it looks right now, the great strength of this country is our resilience. We bounce back. We will again. Not convinced?

First, come back in time with me to when I graduated from college in 1968. That year, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. Our cities were burning.

Tens of thousands of young Americans were being ordered to Vietnam to fight an unwinnable and unjust war that ultimately claimed more than 58,000 American lives and the lives of more than 3 million Vietnamese.

The nation was divided. And then, in November of that year, Richard Nixon was elected president. I recall thinking this nation would never recover. But somehow we bounced back.

In subsequent years we enacted the Environmental Protection Act. We achieved marriage equality for gays and lesbians. We elected a black man to be president of the United States. We passed the Affordable Care Act.

Even now, it’s not as bleak as it sometimes seems. In 2018, a record number of women, people of color, and LGBTQ representatives were elected to Congress, including the first Muslim women.

Wind and solar sources of energy are rapidly becoming cheaper than fossil fuels.

Eighteen states raised their minimum wages. Teachers have gone on strike in Virginia, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Kentucky and North Carolina — and won. The public sided with the teachers.

In several states, after decades of tough-oncrime policies, conservative groups have joined with liberals to reform criminal justice systems. Early childhood education and alternative energy promotion have also expanded nationwide, largely on a bipartisan basis.

The arc of American history reveals an unmistakable pattern. Whenever privilege and power conspire to pull us backward, we eventually rally and move forward.

Sometimes it takes an economic shock like the bursting of a giant speculative bubble. Sometimes we just reach a tipping point where the frustrations of average Americans turn into action.

Now, come forward in time with me.

Look at the startling diversity of younger Americans. Most Americans under 18 years old are ethnically Latino, Asian or Pacific Islander, African American or of more than one race. In 10 years, it’s projected that most Americans under 30 will be.

Three decades from now, most of America will be people of color or of more than one race. That diversity will be a huge strength. Hopefully it will mean more tolerance, less racism, less xenophobia.

Young people are determined to make America better.

There is ample reason for hope.

But hope is not enough. In order for real change to occur, the locus of power in the system will have to change. Millions will need to be organized and energized — not just for a particular election but for an ongoing movement, not just for a particular policy but to reclaim democracy from the moneyed interests so that an abundance of good policies are possible.

The oligarchs and plutocrats would like nothing better than for the rest of us to give up and drop out. That way, they get it all.

But we never have, and we never will. Preserving and expanding democracy has been America’s central project since its founding. It’s an unending fight. And no matter how bleak it may look, we will never stop fighting

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