I moved your piece to my in-box to read and re-read. Each paragraph ‘asked’ for a discussion. I wanted to reply, then thought ‘it would take a book’. Your presentation takes pondering.
I am reading Eric Hobsbawm “The Age of Extremes: 1914–1991” A portion of it is a wrenching description of ‘the world’ — for a brief time, getting on the ‘same page’. That page was “we will never live under a fascist governance.” WWI and WWII had a traumatic way of forcing people to really sift out the values of life — writ big. Are ‘we’ Communists, or Socialists, or Fascists, or democratic liberals? This was the level of decision — one did not need to be an ‘intellectual’ to be really thinking of what these choices would mean. I can imagine only a few places where such a conversation could take place in America. Yet it seems this is the conversation that is needed. From the ‘Spanish Civil War’ into WWII this search for ‘values’ of civilization was happening all over the world. Fascism was *known* for what it truly meant to do to humanity. And ‘we’ fought. And for a while ‘we’ won.
I have given much thought lately (I’m 60+) to the reality that our entire governance sits only on the foundation of willing cooperation. And just looking a the ‘grand picture’ (instead of the hundreds of ways to pick apart the problems we genuinely have), I am most afraid that what we are experiencing is many people, many in power, have decided to just say ‘NO’. What happens when ‘we’ stop cooperating because it is not to our liking? (And, of course I know there are times we must say NO, but once again I’m looking at the big picture of our society.) Most of us live in an abode where agreement with those under the same roof is a struggle — we can easily see what happens when one decides to not cooperate. Now it’s our country. The old American ‘value’ of individualism has become epidemic. There is no “us”. And, ironically, US the first two parts of our country — United States. Seems that is gone too. Thank you for writing this piece — I’m going to give it some more thought. Isn’t that the best success for a writer: “I’m going to read it again!”