What’s next?
Who’s gonna save your world?
Plan B doesn’t exist.
This is probably controversial, but it shouldn’t be:
The United States is not worth rebuilding after … all this.
At least, not without substantial changes.
For one thing, although the U.S. had some good things about it (even some great things) and we should certainly keep those things, it’s never really been all that great on the whole. We have a huge percentage of the population living in poverty and an overlapping huge percentage in prisons; the U.S. has toppled elected governments and supported dictators.
You’d have to do some seriously ghoulish equations to even figure out whether the U.S. has contributed more good or evil to the world during its existence.
And a country like that isn’t worth the effort to re-create after it gets wrecked.
On the other hand, the U.S. has absolutely given the world some amazing and important things; it’s been a model for personal freedom at home and generosity abroad.
It was the one country the whole world used to want to come to.
Our freedom of speech protections are still the best in the world, even today.
So, it’s a bit of a mixed bag.
So we should try to build something new that prevents the evils the U.S. has done in the past from recurring, encourages and reinforces the good things its done and protects against the temptation for authoritarian backsliding that’s taken the country over at the moment.
Not really a simple task, that, but we can do it.
We have to do it.
Because it’s not worth the effort to just get back to where we were; where we were wasn’t good enough for many us to even want to go back to that, much less to put in the effort necessary.
And getting to a place where this can be one country again is going to require some significant work; it will take creating a new system that enough of us actually want to live with and that can prevent a minority group from taking over the State and trying to force its views and lifestyle onto the rest of us.
Preferably by being good enough for everyone that they don’t want to do that anymore.
We can do it.
But it will take some serious conversations about what the State is actually for, and how it can be organized to do that job (and just that job).
It will take a recognition that, in any organization larger than a small village, culture must be kept separate from the State.
And if we can’t do that, it will take recognizing that we can’t be just one country anymore.
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