The Trump era wasn't all bad. We saw progress – thanks to social movements | Rebecca Solnit

Looking back over the past four years, there wasn't just rightwing repression. Movements flourished - and won important battles

The devastation of the Trump administration - to norms and values and public safety, to the climate and the environment and the rights of marginalized groups - is huge and undeniable. But Pablo Neruda's old axiom You can cut down the flowers but you can't stop the spring" might describe what happened. Despite opposition, persecution and real losses, movements for liberation and justice continued to expand not only in power and achievement but in vision.

People looked upward, in awe, during the last days of 2020, and I saw them again and again, watching the full moon of late December, the rare planetary conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn around that time, and here in the Bay Area a magnificent murmuration of starlings above an old Catholic cemetery in San Rafael, tens of thousands of birds swirling together in coordinated flight at sundown, evening after evening. In looking at these tangible spectacles, I believe people were, during this time of political strife and pandemic confinement, seeking the spaciousness of freedom and possibility.