And no.
Never once in all the time this platform was in development did I think, "Oh, we'll release the platform and the new Clinton (or Sanders) administration will adopt it. Mission accomplished!"
What I did think about while the platform was taking shape was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s August 1967 speech, "Where Do We Go From Here?" delivered on the tenth anniversary of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In it, he paraphrased something that had been said by abolitionist Theodore Parker a century earlier:
"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
Both Dr. King and Parker, as with Moses whom Dr. King alluded to in the mountaintop speech he gave the night before he was murdered, never lived to see the fruits of their labor. Parker died in Italy, of overwork and tuberculosis, a year before the start of the Civil War. A quarter-century later, when Frederick Douglass visited Florence, he went straight from the train station of Parker's grave.
There is a line of continuous transmission that pumps like a drumbeat through all those who love justice, who see the moral grandeur and culture of possibility that is the best of humanity.
If you put your hand on your heart, and you will feel it pumping now.
We have to be in it for the long haul if we are in it at all. But we are not in it alone.
Just about every worthy social initiative has been a long time coming. Plessy v. Ferguson, establishing the "separate but equal" doctrine that legitimated racial segregation, was decided in 1896. How many court cases, years of legal research and strategizing, decades of activism, eons of fundraising did it take to end that doctrine? Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954, 58 years later, and that is when the struggle began.
It took just as long for the idea of social insurance, introduced by progressives and unionists, to become law as Social Security in 1935. It took 70 years after the mid-19th century Seneca Falls Convention for women's suffrage to be ratified by the 19th amendment. The struggle for LGBTQ legal rights persevered for decades before same-sex marriage began to be legalized.
Changing these laws has been just one part of these movements for social justice, and it couldn't have happened without changing the story first.
History's pendulum swings. Tearing down can be very fast: a symbol of social progress disappears overnight, generating a tidal wave of disappointment and anger. Building is what takes time. Good parents and teachers know the painstaking investment required to nurture a young and promising life; good farmers and foresters understand permaculture and sustainable harvest; good healers are prepared for the long haul of preventive care; good organizers understand the cultivation that democracy requires.
When the pendulum swings away from justice, what sustains our perseverance?
Cultural organizers and transformative arts workers know this: whatever engages the whole person--body, emotions, intellect, and spirit--the work that braids pleasure and purpose, is the most powerful, the most sustaining, and the most likely to accomplish the great awakening needed now.
That work feeds us because it is love in the service of justice and healing--personal, political, and planetary.
Dr. King's remark about the arc of the moral universe came late in a long speech recounting the SCLC's progress and the work that remained to be done. I want to share some things he said first:
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