I saw your face in a magazine in a fever dream and it cut me out

[sovay]

I am sick of terrible things happening when there is no need for them to. I am not talking about the inopportune but natural wind-down of entropy; I am talking about acts of cruelty and conscious destruction. It is not news and it is commonplace, but I am sick of it.

I have to wish my maledictions very carefully: a rising tide of disaster drowns the most vulnerable first. May those people who are capable of nothing but destruction reap it; may the rest of us live to build our world.

From Jill Lepore's "The Last Time Democracy Almost Died": "Don't ask whether you need an umbrella. Go outside and stop the rain."

Comments

[asakiyume]

We'll find a way through. We're here for each other.

(It is dreadful, though)

[phi]

"May those people who are capable of nothing but destruction reap it; may the rest of us live to build our world."

Amen and amen. From your lips to God's ears. I am so deeply heartsick, and the admonition "do not despair at the brokenness of the world" is on the brink of impossible for me.

[gwynnega]

Co-signing that malediction.

[cynthia1960]

Me too. It focuses the wrath on those who have earned it.

[cmcmck]

Brexit.......

Sigh :o(

[sovay]

Brexit.......

That is one of the unnecessary destructions I was thinking of.

*hugs*

[negothick]

Thank you for linking to that Jill Lepore essay. What a writer she is! Her knowledge of history is so deep, so effortlessly does she pull her parallels, while letting us make the analogies to our present moment. The only parallel I thought she might have made is that of isolationism, the "America First" movement, some of whose proponents believed we could make a separate peace with Hitler, that we could "do business" with Hitler's state. Jo Walton's Farthing and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America should be required reading these days.

[a_reasonable_man]

I liked the Lepore essay, too. If you want to read the history of the public democratic forums she writes about, see Jess Gilbert, Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal (Yale University Press, 2015).

[labingi]

Thank you for the link to this essay. I confess I skimmed it, being short of time, but it offers good perspective.

Increasingly, I'm asking myself, "What do/should we want society to be?" I'm increasingly convinced the United States as a nation is not the answer; it's too deeply founded on land theft for one thing to reconstruct itself an in image of real justice. But I don't mean to say all it's ideas and accomplishments are bad: I believe in democracy and freedom of speech and liberty and equality and pluralism (all with some caveats). But how can good things shine through into a future that addresses the wrongs of the past, one that acknowledges slavery and racism and pursues reparations, yes, but also one that acknowledges that the US does not belong on US land, and what do we do about that? How do we begin to return America to its tribes will acknowledging the need (if not right) of hundreds of millions of others to inhabit the only home we've ever known? Where should we be going?