Construction and Destruction…
Not that I have lost any hope. All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die. I don’t know why we should expect it to. It seems fairly obvious that two sides of a mirror are required before one has a mirror, that two forces are necessary in man before he is man. I asked [the influential microbiologist] Paul de Kruif once if he would like to cure all disease and he said yes. Then I suggested that the man he loved and wanted to cure was a product of all his filth and disease and meanness, his hunger and cruelty. Cure those and you would have not man but an entirely new species you wouldn’t recognize and probably wouldn’t like.
–excerpt Steinbeck: A Life In Letters by John Steinbeck
Steinbeck’s words are worth remembering. Like many others I am dismayed by the Trump administrations machinations to spend five billion dollars on a wall, symbolic of their nativism, and the deeply rooted racism within the American psyche. A wall to keep people out is emblematic of a totalitarian regime. Hadrian’s wall comes to mind across Great Britain, a barrier to the clans that resisted Roman colonization. Recent editions were the wall between East and West Berlin, and the current Israeli wall dividing Israel from the West Bank and Gaza. That wall is fortified by remotely activated machine gun nests.
“All the goodness and heroisms will rise up again.”
