The Original Sin of America, Part VI: Good Night, and Good Luck

If totalitarian takeovers, climate disaster and mass migration is indeed the future of human – not just American – civilization, I am reminded of another favorite poem:

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

– Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Hundreds of thousands of civilizations have existed. We know about maybe .01 percent. The most powerful at their peak all thought they were eternal empires without end. The inability to conceive of alternate futures is a weakness that befalls those who fear to lose what they have. To lose what you have, you first have to have it. Just let it go – and be truly free.

At least, that’s what I’m telling myself in the lead up to Election Day (Week really, thanks to fascist Republicans deliberately delaying vote counts to purposefully sow doubt about the election). What happens after is anyone’s guess. I pray for a Harris victory. But her presidency won’t heal the long-festering wounds repeatedly stitched and ripped open over the course of the country’s history.

Those can only be addressed at the bottom, among the people who truly make up a nation. Are they grievance-poisoned loners who want to watch the world burn? Or are they people who value humility, judgment, and good character?

The good news: the latter outnumber the former by a wide margin. The bad news: given the aforementioned skewing of American democracy via archaic carve-outs for slaveholders, America is on the precipice of permanent minority rule – that minority being, of course, white land-owning men.

Do I think we’ll see a world without this toxic conception of property? We have before. There’s nothing to suggest we can’t again. The broader point is, the world will change, with or without us, often in directions we did not choose.

All we get to decide is how we adapt, what we bring with us – and what we leave behind.