When I went to the dentist last week, I didn’t plan to bring up racism and entrenched systemic abuse of Black people in the U.S. Dodging conflict was a survival skill I learned in childhood, but I pushed past my aversion and took a risk. It was a tiny risk in a situation that wasn’t dire, but the results illustrate that facing difficult issues instead of skimming over the surface can help us break old patterns.

During last year’s second presidential debate, Donald Trump made certain to note how horribly things were going on his watch:

“We have to open our country,” the big, dumb adobe mud hut brayed. “We’re not going to have a country. You can’t do this, we can’t keep this country closed. It is a massive country with a massive economy. People are losing their jobs, they’re committing suicide.

The Trump administration—the malignant milieu of racism, bad ideas, and bad, racist ideas—had, for the past two-plus years, limited the use of consent decrees in holding police departments accountable for abusive (read: racist) behavior. Now, Attorney General Merrick Garland is reversing that Trump-era policy.

In January, President Joe Biden ordered the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to release an emergency temporary standard on COVID-19 safety in the workplace by March 15. Well, March 15 has come and gone, as has April 15, and there’s no emergency standard, despite what Dr. Anthony Fauci described this week as “an unacceptably high level” of COVID-19 cases every day in the United States.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has a specific classification for what is known as a “rare pediatric disease.” Every condition that meets that designation is, by definition, horrible. These are the diseases that most families are blissfully unaware of, while for others the names of these diseases—Severe Combined Immunodeficiency Disease, CANDLE Syndrome, Pompe Disease—become a dark drumbeat that sounds behind each moment of their lives.