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

[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?