I think we lack a "societal mission", if that's even a term. We've got no vision of a future we can come together to achieve through hard work. As much as it pains me to say this, at least in the 2000s-2010s we told ourselves we were going to reinvent the world by building software startups and make every mundane thing in our lives smarter, with software. Maybe half of that was BS, but it sure felt like we were aligning as a society to do something. Now, it feels like we're just putting out fires and fixing stuff as it's breaking.
Now is the time for meaningful work. We really need to restart the WPA (1). It wasn't just a civic infrastructure program, it also supported musicians, playrights, artists, because "Hell, they’ve got to eat, too" (2). It's amazing how many tested solutions from the progressive era of this country would be turnkey today if we could only muster the political will. The country is so much more fractured than it was in this era as well, labor in the U.S. will never be a unified political force like it is in other countries or even like it was in this country during this era. Media has kept it fractured and headless for decades.
