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

[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).