(no subject)

[kuangning]

dewhitton made a post awhile back about a wounded pigeon. The image has been lodged firmly in my mind ever since. But this is not about a pigeon, it's about an eagle. The symbol for majestic, powerful, beautiful America and all the ideals that were wrapped up in her.

The lifeblood of America, through all her history, has been her people. The ones who were here when the settlers arrived, the ones who crossed oceans to find their new futures bound up in her own, the ones who walked or drove or rode over those imaginary lines other men drew to cast their lot with the upstart nation and her people.

The heart of the eagle, the driving force of the populace, is a knot of dreams and beliefs and ideals that begins to be laid out with we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. The fathers of the nation would go on to follow that sweeping statement with equally forceful and adamant ones that laid out how men shall be treated. But before they did that, they made that statement; the statement which told us why.

Those statements that followed, and the laws which have followed them throughout the nation's history, are the eagle's immune system, almost inseparable from the men and women who make them and carry them out. They were put in place to protect the rights of and provide for the safety of the people from their government, leaving largely to the states and the people themselves the protection of the people from external threats, except that they provided for the separate militias, when actually called into the service of the government, and the Army and Navy, to be under Presidential command.

I believe that the next truly important system in the body was one of which the fathers had not conceived. If the people are the lifeblood, they are also liver and kidneys, brain and spleen... and information has become the hormones of the body, secreted here, released there, passive in itself but sparking every action to some extent.

The eagle, like Den's pigeon, is dying. I believe that history will record September 11th, 2001 as the beginning of the fall of the United States of America -- not alone through an act of terrorism, but through the self-parasitic actions which followed, carried out by a government which failed to understand the importance of those ideals to the nation, and which stripped and circumvented those laws and, in effect, turned the body's immune system against the body itself. The paralysis we can observe in ourselves and each other now will be, and indeed must be followed by numbness as the flow of information becomes stunted and less reliable, as the flow of misinformation increases in volume and virulence, as the government becomes less and less responsive to the will of the people it is supposed to represent.

The government now seems to interpret verbal criticism as being almost the same as armed opposition, as if you or I were to be hurt as badly by the stab of the doctor's needle as the stab of a knife wielded by a thug. It is responding by releasing more information to justify its actions to us by causing us to fear the threat from which only it can protect us, if only we will give up more and more of our safeguards and our rights, to which we respond with criticism, to which it responds with more information to justify its actions... a positive feedback loop that may only end with regime change or with the remaking of the nation. I've come to believe that there is little chance of a regime change soon enough or complete enough to avoid the breaking and remaking of the nation. The colours will still fly. The old familiar phrases will still be voiced. But the heart of America will be broken and stilled, and faith, innocence, and ideals, once forfeited, are as hard to restore as virginity.

This, like so much said by so many other people, counts for very little. Like everyone else, I can see no effective course of action. So we sit, paralysed in spirit if not physically, and we record what we feel powerless to change, and we pour out eulogies for the nation and ourselves.

There are, perhaps, worse ways to spend a few years.

Comments

[kuangning]

You have a point there. Writing to the opposition, such as it is, is something that I can do, and am willing to do. I think the chances of it changing anything are slim to none, but I can try, and I will.