As we look back on the most important and inspiring cultural and political shifts in the direction of liberty and justice, we inevitably focus on the most dramatic and historically visible events and milestones (such as the Civil War in the abolition of slavery or the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the struggle for civil rights of African Americans).
Typically, however, those events occur only after an irrevocable change in the minds of enough of a population that a huge, favorable political change has become in some sense “inevitable,” even though the exact means and details of that change cannot be predicted.
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