We Have Failed

It’s funny. As I was sitting down to write this piece, I went searching for a quote that I’ve often heard used to describe America as a “Great Experiement” or a “Grand Experiment.”

I’ve seen the quote ascribed to Washington, Jefferson, and De Tocqueville.

Funny. Turns out that none of them ever used that phrasing. At least, it hasn’t been fully confirmed that any of them did. It just sounds like something they might have said.

Seems kind of fitting that it’s another lie that we have told to ourselves.

I wrote the other day about being tired, and the events of the last couple of days have done nothing to alleviate the exhaustion I feel. Instead, that exhaustion has now found a new running mate to join it as it scrambles around my bones and my brain:

Despair.

Deep, deep despair.

My natural pessimism as a black man in America in the 21st century has evolved like a Pokémon into full on nihilism now.

We, as a country, are broken beyond repair.

There is no functioning central democratically elected government anymore.

We are no better than a banana republic now; an oligarchical kakistocracy that is this close to becoming a fascist police state. And given the events of the last 48 hours or so, I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic in making that observation.

Years of defunding education. Years of defunding needed public services. Years of giving local police military grade tactical gear. Years of doing nothing about the “bad apples”, instead just shrugging shoulders and allowing the ones who are actually fired to just move on to another department to continue being a bad apple

Apples give off ethylene, which is a natural hydrocarbon and a plant hormone. Ethylene gas is use to aid in the ripening of fruit. If you want to speed up the ripening of other fruits, one thing you can do is put those fruits in a bag with a ripe apple. The ethylene that the apple gives off will ripen those fruits.

But like any fruit, it is considered spoiled if it ripens too much. As that apple goes bad, it gives off more and more ethylene gas. Which, if stored with other apples, causes them to go bad faster. Pretty soon, that rotten apple can spoil the whole bunch.

You don’t let that rotten apple stick around. What you’re supposed to do as soon as you discover a rotten apple is remove it from the other apples so it cannot wreak havoc, shooting its gas off willy-nilly, and ruin the rest of your good apples.

Do you get the point now, folks who like to say that it’s just “a few bad apples”?

Do you see why you don’t just let the bad apples hang around the good ones? The good apples can’t change those bad apples back to being good. It doesn’t work that way.

It’s a jejune statement by yours truly to just say that we are fucked as a nation, and that we are probably done. I readily admit that. I wish I had something deeper and more profound to say about what needs to happen moving forward.

But the truth is? I don’t know. And I fear that short of a true revolution, or another civil war, we can’t just pick up the pieces of our shattered nation and move forward. Gorilla Glue isn’t going to fix this. Hell, duct tape isn’t even going to fix this.

During the shutdowns, there was a lot of wishing for a return to normal. I stated to folks at that point that I don’t think we should desire a return to normal, as a lot of the financial and structural inequality in our country was exposed.

Well, now the other elements of the structural inequality in our country is being exposed. Inequality that has been here, in some form or another, since 1619 and sanctioned, in many places, by the state and the country itself.

Sometimes, you just have to throw things away and start over. Delete the entire document. Throw the half assembled meal in the trash. Erase the entire whiteboard and start from scratch.

Maybe, after 400 years on this soil, we need to just start anew.