Americans don’t “ruin everything”. America has ruined them, and everything around it. Americans are simply fucked beyond most of their individual capacities to parse that fact.
Some of us still genuinely care about other people, and deeply — the ones who haven’t given up yet and checked out, at least.
Not that long ago, I used to avidly, ardently teach children how simple it can be to choose kindness. Now, I’m all but broken to my core, and I’m all outta metaphor. How can I expect anyone else to be capable of better, for longer — or even just pick up where I set down that torch, that essential flame?
No, Americans don’t ruin everything. We are ruined, hollowed and shaken. The ones who live to see what comes after might be able to carry these lessons to the next generation, but who can say.
Hope, I guess. You might be around when something sparkly happens from that. I would like that.
You are all waiting for the other shoe to drop, meanwhile, something like the 487th shoe has dropped and everyone’s still waiting for just that one more.
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Time is a flat circle, as they say…
“[B]ut I see nothing in this renewal of the game of ‘Robin’s alive’ but a general demoralization of the nation, a filching from industry it’s honest earnings, wherewith to build up palaces, and raise gambling stock for swindlers and shavers, who are to close too their career of piracies by fraudulent bankruptcies. my dependance for a remedy however, is in the wisdom which grows with time and suffering. whether the succeeding generation is to be more virtuous than their predecessors I cannot say; but I am sure they will have more worldly wisdom, and enough, I hope, to know that honesty is the 1st chapter in the book of wisdom.” - Thomas Jefferson to Nathaniel Macon, January 12, 1819[1] References
^ PTJ:RS, 13:571-72. Polygraph copy at the Library of Congress. Transcription available at Founders Online.
