The Tyranny of 'It Takes Time'

We’ve been sold a story that transformational change takes generations. It’s bullshit, and history proves it.

There’s this thing that happens when you talk about fixing big problems in America. Healthcare, infrastructure, manufacturing, whatever. The serious people instantly dismiss you, saying, “Well, these things take time. You can’t just snap your fingers. This is generational work.”

And I’m here to tell you that’s a lie. Not a mistake. Not an oversimplification. A lie. A useful, profitable, power-preserving lie.

Because when you actually look at American history, not the sanitized version, but the real thing, what you see is that when we decided to do big things, we did them fast. Shockingly fast. We built the Transcontinental Railroad in seven years with, what, hammers and dynamite and Chinese labor we treated like shit? The Panama Canal took a decade and we were literally fighting yellow fever while digging through a jungle.

The New Deal didn’t take fifty years to turn around the Great Depression. The TVA was created in 1933 and within a few years it had dammed rivers, stopped floods, and brought electricity to one of the poorest regions in the country. The Rural Electrification Administration launched in 1935, and in one decade, one, American farms went from about 10% electrified to nearly 90%. That’s not slow. That’s lightning fast.

We turned California into a water-rich state with massive projects like Hoover Dam, the Central Valley Project, and the California Aqueduct. We built systems that could move water hundreds of miles, irrigate deserts, and power entire cities. These weren’t slow, cautious endeavors. They were ambitious and they got done.

And then there’s the Arsenal of Democracy. This one really tells the story. We went from fields to operational factories in 18 months. Ford’s Willow Run plant went from dirt to producing a B-24 bomber every single hour. We created entire industries, synthetic rubber, in about 18 months when our supply chains got cut off. Started basically from scratch in 1942 and by 1944 we had more than 50 factories producing hundreds of thousands of tons. We trained nurses, welders, engineers at a pace that would make today’s workforce development people’s heads explode.

Kennedy said we’d go to the moon before the decade was out. We did it in eight years. Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highway Act in 1956 and in 35 years we’d built the largest public works project in human history.

And we still can do it when we want to. After September 11, Congress passed the Iraq War authorization. When Bush decided to invade, we deployed 170,000 troops to the other side of the world in weeks. When the banks were collapsing in 2008, Treasury Secretary Paulson announced the bailout plan on September 20. Congress passed a $700 billion program by October 3. Less than two weeks.

When it matters, when the right people need it, it gets done fast.

Theoretically, we should be faster now, not slower. We have supercomputers. GPS-guided machinery. Instant global communication. Scientific knowledge our grandparents couldn’t have imagined. And yet we can’t build a bridge without a decade of permits and studies. High-speed rail? A joke. China builds tens of thousands of miles while we’re still debating routes.

Hurricane Helene hit Asheville in September 2024. Washed out Interstate 40, one of the main routes between Tennessee and North Carolina. They got one lane in each direction open by March 2025, five months later. Full repairs? Won’t be done until 2028. Four years to rebuild a highway. Meanwhile we built the entire Interstate system in 35 years.

What changed?

Slowness became the business model.

Think about it. During the Gilded Age, which was a shitshow in its own ways, don’t get me wrong, but even the robber barons had to build something to extract their wealth. Vanderbilt had to lay the railroad tracks. Carnegie had to make the steel. Rockefeller had to drill the oil and refine it. Production was how you got paid.

Now? You get paid for the study. For the consultation. For the financial engineering. Private equity makes money on the leveraged buyout, not on what the company produces. Defense contractors make money on cost overruns and delays. The consultant class bills by the hour, so why would anything ever finish?

Look at something like the Inflation Reduction Act or the infrastructure bill. Massive amounts of money, right? But it doesn’t flow based on what you’ve accomplished. It flows to “the market” with the assumption that the market will build the thing. We’ve forgotten that you can just contract for deliverables. Pay when the bridge is built. Pay when the factory is running. Pay when homes are wired. Instead, we’re paying for the opportunity that maybe someone will build something if the returns are sufficient and the market conditions align and the stars are right.

The mechanisms of slowness are what make money now.

We’ve gotten to the point where the productive economy, where people actually make things, has been replaced by an economy that just makes money off of money and other people’s work. We gave away our means of production. We privatized the stuff that states and cities and towns used to do. Your trash pickup. Your road maintenance. Your water treatment. We turned all of it over to private contractors who get paid whether the job gets done or not.

We’ve layered in so much bureaucracy, so many approval processes, so many chances for someone to get their beak wet, that actually doing something is almost incidental to the process.

And we’ve stopped training people to build. Our education system doesn’t nurture doers anymore. It nurtures people who can navigate systems, who can optimize within constraints, who can manage, but not people who can create and build and make things happen.

What saddens me is that we’ve accepted this as truth, assuming that these eras are gone and never coming back. We’ve given up. Worse, we’ve internalized it so deeply that the lie has become our reality. We don’t just believe change takes decades, we’ve stopped being able to imagine it happening faster. Our expectations have been so thoroughly dampened that proposing rapid transformation, whether it’s infrastructure, healthcare, supply chains, or political reform, marks you as unserious. A simpleton. Someone who just doesn’t understand how the world works.

Marginal changes. Incremental progress. That’s what serious people propose. Anything more is dismissed as naive and unserious. And so we’ve narrowed our own capacity to build toward big visions, to achieve transformative things. Not because we can’t, but because we’ve been trained not to try.

What unlocked those fast eras? Unity of purpose. When we built the nation during the Progressive Era, when we rebuilt capacity after the Depression, when we fought the Nazis, when we raced the Soviets to space, in every case, there was a shared understanding that there was no option but to move quickly. That unity created political permission to bypass all the normal extraction points. During World War II, you couldn’t have some congressman holding up factory construction because his donor wanted the contract instead. The existential threat created a temporary override of all the grift.

The crisis made speed possible by making the usual bullshit unacceptable.

We don’t have that now. What we have is a class of people who benefit enormously from slowness. The entrenched elite. The consultant class that bills forever. The incumbents in Congress. And mostly, the people they actually serve: the multi-trillion dollar corporations and the centi-billionaire oligarchs who’ve built their wealth on financial extraction rather than production.

They need you to believe that change takes time. They need you to be patient. They need you to trust that they’re working on it. Because the moment you stop believing that, the moment you remember that we built the Hoover Dam in five years, that we electrified rural America in a decade, that we went from dirt to bombers in 18 months, you start asking why the fuck we can’t build a train.

And that’s a question they really don’t want to answer.

If we want housing, if we want to rebuild our manufacturing and industrial base, if we want the factories here again, if we want these things again, it can be done. Taking “it’ll take decades to get it done” as an answer tells us that it will never get done. That’s the point. That’s the scam.

The challenges we face aren’t less urgent than fighting the Nazis or landing on the moon. They just lack the unified political will to overcome the people profiting from inaction. But that will can be created. It has been before.

The first step is rejecting the lie. Big things don’t have to take time. They take decision. They take unity. They take a willingness to stop letting the people who profit from slowness set the pace.

We’ve done it before. We can do it again. We just have to stop believing that we can’t.