Finishing with Jill Lepore

Today's news: corona virus in all 50 states and Trump makes me think of  Nero looking for a fiddle. 

Jill Lepore includes this statement in her history of the United States:

...But a nation cannot choose its past, it can only choose its future....

 These Truths: a History of the United States (W.W. Norton, 2018); Epilogue; p. 788

Her history shows a past where we have not lived up to our creed of equal rights. This doesn't mean we cannot do so in the days to come. The alternative looks bloody and our ruin.

Dr. Lepore finishes with these two paragraphs:

The ship of state lurched and reeled. Liberals, blown down by the slightest breeze, had neglected to trim the ship's sails, leaving the canvas to flap and tear in a rising wind, the rigging flailing. Huddled belowdecks, they had failed to plot a course, having lost sight of the horizon and their grasp on any compass. On deck, conservatives had pulled up the ship's planking to make bonfires of rage: they had counted the popular will by demolishing the idea of truth itself, smashing the ship's very mast.

It would fall to a new generation of Americans, reckoning what their forebears had wrought, to fathom the depths pf the doom-black sea. If they meant to repair the tattered ship, they would need to fell the most majestic pine in a deer-haunted forest and raise a new mast that could pierce the clouded sky. With sharpened adzes, they would have to hew timbers of cedar and oak into planks, straight and true. They would need to drive home nails with the untiring swing of mighty arms and, with needles held tenderly in nimble fingers, stitch new sails out of the ragged canvas of their goodwill. Knowing that heat and sparks and hammers and anvils are not enough, they would have to forge an anchor in the glowing fire of their ideals. And to steer that ship through wind and wave, they would need to learn an ancient and nearly forgotten art: how to navigate by the stars. 

pp. 788-89

There are serious ideas wrapped in fine writing. I have a reason for this long quote. Are you fixing our problems or letting them fester? The responsibility lies with you citizens, you fine folks, to choose our country's fate. Will your fixing to be for the good of all or just yourself?

I finish now. I'll spend the rest of the day reading Margaret Atwood's The Testaments.

sch

3/18/20