The NFL (the National Football League) in the US has approved a policy that requires players to stand while the national anthem is played before matches. This effectively prevents the act of kneeling that some players, beginning with Colin Kaepernick, used to draw attention to racial tensions within the country. I found a fantastic headline in the Politico on this:
This is, of course, a tribute to the iconic lines uttered by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the march to Montgomery. Dr. King said that the arc of the moral universe is long but that it bends towards justice. These lines, borrowed from a nineteenth century preacher named Theodore Parker, are a cause for optimism. They emphasise that if you are on the path of righteousness, the world will eventually come around to your way of thinking, even if the odds seem stacked against you in the present.
Ta-Nehisi Coates highlighted this in a piece last year when he drew a parallel between the anthem protests and the civil rights movement. He said that the point of such protests and movements is not so much to convince your contemporaries, who are likely to have set opinions, but to reach out to future generations and make them understand what is right.
This is an idea worth holding close in the field of public policy. When a lot of what you advocate for goes against the grain of conventional thinking, it is reassuring to believe that things will take a turn for the better in the future.