That was my response to someone on Facebook the other day with respect to the NO KINGS international demonstrations of last Saturday. I said this in the heat of the moment with utter conviction.
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“America as we have known it is over.” *
*EJS Downs 1 3-31-26
Yesterday, I said the above (paraphrasing) to a separate person on Facebook. I made both statements with equal fervor and almost-equal certainty. I felt no sense of contradiction nor any requirement to edit myself for consistency. I spoke as if I knew both things to be equally true. I’m not entirely sure if I even recalled immediately after the second comment that I was the same person who had also made the first one 🥴.
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But… here we are. I’m caught in a paradox. That’s a slippery word. Even standard dictionaries define it differently in subtle ways. I’ve decided on this one:
…a figure of speech that seems to contradict itself, but which, upon further examination, contains some kernel of truth or reason.
The second part of that description is often overlooked, but it’s what matters to us in this moment. A true paradox cannot be complete nonsense. It must contain an unexpected linkage to a deeper truth. What might be that “…deeper truth” here 🤔?
If you ask me, it’s this: We are in an era of unmitigated destruction. Much that is familiar and customary is in a stage of being blasted away. To paraphrase Hemingway in a new context, “We failed slowly at first, and then suddenly”. As surely as a dawning geological age, America is on the doorstep of another beginning. It might be a new way forward. We need to work (both ruthlessly and creatively) to get it right. Whether we can steer ourselves to better days or will simply be forever stranded on the desolate beaches of forgotten history is the question hanging in the balance.
Trump and his MAGA acolytes misunderstand much about America, but I think they somehow stumbled to one insight: We aren’t going backwards to anything. We aren’t restoring the genteel bipartisan consensus which has held in our country for so long (and for which so many of us older folks pine today in spite of ourselves). That’s a thing of the past, as obsolete in its own way as coal-oil lamps.
I’m reasonably sure that Trump and his parade of horriblities will fall. They’re too wicked, perverted, and deranged to continue indefinitely. They are too thoroughly Un-American (in the classical sense) to persist in a nation that (whatever its faults both historically and currently) retains yet a powerful measure of goodwill toward America’s eternal higher principles.
As is healthy and normal among peaceful and law-abiding people, we can be slow to erupt. We want mostly to be left alone to our quiet pursuits. But erupt we will 😠, and history has shown us to be an implacable foe in those occasional angry and righteous moments when we’re left with no alternative.
The banishment of the outlaw Trump and the defeat of MAGA are vitally important to our survival as a society, but they are only part of the problem (perhaps not even the largest part?). We have a civilization to reconstruct, with a more humane and durable design this time around. Much that is being broken as we speak cannot be replaced. Some of what is broken should not be replaced! We are in a moment in our history where it’s possible to consider realistic possibilities to correct defects (another paradox in this situation). That’s the good news 🙂.
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The bad news is that we have difficult and dangerous work to do before we can get there. The sooner we get started, the sooner we can finish. 🌞
