Even rabbits must rise when the times require.
The times do require. In his July 10th New York Times column, Roger Cohen lays out the peril. As the Preposterous Pump’s niece put it, the most dangerous man in the world in our time is entering his most dangerous period. It will be the culmination of his attempts to destroy American democracy and the rule of law, even in the truncated form it now obtains (one remembers ancient Greece and the only twenty-five percent of the population who could participate in that democracy as their plague hit.)
Our plague has hit. (A plague has hit rabbits too, but that is a subject for another day.)
“Malign incompetence,” as David Frum in the Atlantic called it, has meant the unnecessary deaths of thousands in the USA and the worst is yet to come.
If there is anything the virus may have taught us — it is not teaching anything to a leader sworn to protect all citizens except that a virus can be used as a propaganda tool — it is a reminder to the collective of the fragility of life and that it is not hate that generates happiness and security but love. As the Dalai Lama put it, my religion is kindness.
In the meantime, we know dictators do not step down. Their instinct is to rule forever, because they have no other life, only power, corruption, abuse, division, hate. They have to be removed, in this case by the resurgent strength of democracy.
Democratic processes are fragile. Witness the Weimar Republic. Witness Hungary. Witness Venezuela, Brazil.
Today and here, if this democracy’s processes are still valued by its citizens, if they have not lost their reason and become the mob, if indeed they continue to want to be citizens at all, and not serfs, they must look to the future, not a blind fantasy about a cruel past, but to resume the great experiment that even with all its flaws — central being slavery — so caught the heart of the world in the light of its beacon shining in New York harbour.
J. B. Thompson 