Time & Perspective Quote by Tavis Smiley

Smiley’s line reads like a news chyron that refuses to stay on the screen. The sentences land in blunt, percussive beats: “The storm came.” Period. “Lives were washed away.” Period. It’s disaster language stripped of ornament, the kind that mimics shock itself. That minimalist cadence is doing moral work. By denying the reader narrative comfort - no names, no comforting arc - it forces attention onto consequence.

The phrase “ancient pains” is the key tell. Smiley isn’t only describing a weather event; he’s pointing at the way catastrophe excavates history. Floods don’t just destroy houses, they expose the fault lines underneath them: segregated neighborhoods, neglected infrastructure, health disparities, the slow violence that’s easy to ignore until water makes it visible. “Resurfaced” is a sharp verb here because it suggests those pains were never resolved, only submerged.

Then he pivots: “Now it is time for a sea of change.” The wordplay is deliberate - turning the language of water from erasure into agency. “Sea of change” is a familiar idiom, but in this context it feels earned: the same element that took lives becomes the metaphor for collective transformation. The subtext is political without naming a policy: grief must not be allowed to remain merely sentimental. Smiley’s intent is to convert mourning into mandate, to argue that rebuilding without reckoning is just preparing the next storm’s casualty list.