Feidin Santana relives the morning of Saturday 4 April 2015 on a near continuous loop. It was around 9.30am and the 23-year-old was running uncharacteristically late for work. As he walked his usual route through the back streets of North Charleston, something caught his eye: a black man running away from a white police officer.

Santana followed the chase for a few yards to a deserted patch of lawn behind a pawn shop and a car dealership. Here the officer caught up with the man, and ended up on top of him. Watching from behind a chainlink fence, Santana instinctively reached for his phone and pressed record.

The morning was still, silent. “You could hear birds flying, the swing of their wings,” Santana says as he stands, three months later, where he was that day. “You could hear everything; the sounds of the officer, the gunshots. Everything.”

Santana had hoped he might be noticed. “I believed my presence would prevent something,” he says softly, his voice almost drowned by the hum of cicadas. “But it didn’t happen that way.”

We are products of our times. Growing up, we all have a vague sense of history but that sense cannot help us understand the times in which we live. Baby boomers would have no idea how their world would be shaped by post-WWII policies. Generation X would have no idea how their world would be shaped by the Vietnam conflict. Generation Y would have no idea how their world would be shaped by Reaganomics. And currently, we millennials had no idea how our world would be shaped by the events of September 11th.

We try to understand our situation in its historical context, but for each situation there had been no historical context with which to draw comparison. We had never had to rebuild after a second global conflict. We had never had to unite against an unpopular war. We had never had to adapt to top-down economic theory. And we never had to experience a terrorist attack on American soil. With each of these situations, we were left without a blueprint for how to feel, how to act, or how to live our lives in the most meaningful way. Each situation briefly brought us together and then each situation inevitably drove us apart.

As a sixteen-year-old, I remember watching the Twin Towers fall. I had no idea what it meant. I had no idea America even had enemies. When a student in my math class asked to vote for which country attacked us, I raised by hand for Iraq because I vaguely knew we were involved in some kind of war over there a decade earlier. The names Al Qaeda or Bin Laden were foreign to all of us. In the coming days, as our nation struggled to deal with the terrorist attack, I did what everyone in my small New Hampshire home town did: Bought a miniature flag and duct taped it to my car. At the time, it was the only way I knew to fight terrorism.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, American patriotism was at an all-time high. George W. Bush's approval rating soared to 90%, the highest in Gallup history. Comedian Will Ferrell, appearing as George W. Bush for the Concert for New York in October of that year, remarked that he could smoke the terrorists into caves, then out of caves, then back into caves because "My approval rating is, like, 106% right now." We saw the president as a beacon of hope in an otherwise uncertain world and we knew what he was doing was right. Our nation knew that justice must be served for those horrific acts on September 11th, and so we supported the Bush administration when it said it had evidence that Iraq under Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that war was our only option.

Watching President Barack Obama explain and defend the landmark nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 group, I was struck by how fragile are the attempts at peace, and how inertia – be it short-sighted stubbornness, ideology, political partisanship and expediency, or a lucrative status quo invested in armaments, brinksmanship, and a permanent war footing – often tends to lead us to disunity, lawlessness and chaos.

I was also struck by how this president, derided by his critics as dangerously naïve, feckless, a mere “community organizer,” embodies no less than the spirit and the vision of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who lifted this country out of the worst economic disaster in its history by first providing work, hope and inspiration to an impoverished nation and then, faced with the prospect of a holocaust engulfing Europe, organized the U.S. and other countries into an allied coalition which succeeded in turning the tide of history, liberating Europe and Asia from fascism, and ensuring decades of good relations between our former enemies.

Similarly, President John F. Kennedy sought to overcome the Cold War nuclear stalemate, brokering the historic Test Ban Treaty with the Soviets and staring down Premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis – but heroically avoiding war, over the objections of opponents who loudly urged him to show “leadership” and “strength.”

JFK also worked to promote American well-being and optimism through a widely shared prosperity and an emphasis on scientific, educational and cultural achievements, sought to community-organize through health care initiatives and civil rights reform, and promoted a sense of national purpose through initiatives such as the space program and the Peace Corps.

The Black Lives Matter campaign is seeing to it that the rules they relied on for courting the vote no longer apply.

The potent social media-driven movement, sparked in the aftermath of Florida teen Trayvon Martin’s 2012 shooting death and reignited in the racial unrest in response to the deaths of other unarmed African Americans at the hands of police over the last year, has 2016 contenders scrambling to adjust their strategies. The protesters involved are proving masterful at refocusing the spotlight.

Candidates who might otherwise have been complacent, given their high marks on legislative report cards from the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People and endorsements from an older generation of black leaders, have had to more directly confront uncomfortable questions of racial inequality and the mistreatment of blacks by the criminal justice system.

“We want to ensure that these candidates will actually deal with the issues that black people face,” said Patrisse Cullors, a movement cofounder from Los Angeles. “The reality is that it’s still not legal to be black in this country.”