Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Grimes

Progress, Grimes is warning, is almost always slower than the people demanding it and faster than the people profiting from delay. By invoking “Black Lung,” he pulls a brutal piece of labor history onto the table: a disease workers inhaled for years, then spent more years trying to prove was real enough to deserve compensation. The timeline matters. “About six years” isn’t trivia, it’s a rebuke to today’s performative impatience. If a crisis that visible and deadly still required half a decade of grinding legislative work, what makes anyone think contemporary fights will resolve in a single news cycle?

The subtext is aimed at lobby culture, but not in the easy, villain-of-the-week way. Grimes sketches a specific breed of political actor: groups who “work the whole session” and feel entitled to results on schedule, as if civic change is a vending machine. He’s not celebrating gridlock; he’s indicting the expectation of immediacy. The line “It didn’t come just instantly” is almost childlike in phrasing, which gives it bite. It sounds like common sense, the kind you shouldn’t have to say out loud, and that’s the point: people in power have forgotten it.

Contextually, he’s also hinting at how reforms actually happen: through persistence, coalition-building, and the grim leverage of human suffering. Black Lung legislation didn’t “arrive,” it was extracted. Grimes uses that history to puncture modern outrage that’s more about branding a “win” than sustaining a cause.