Before and After the Fall

I woke up in the middle of the night with a certain phrase floating around in my mind, which went something like this: that it would be both ironic and somehow fitting if the ultimate downfall of America should be recorded in history as a failure to overcome the evils that have haunted the nation from the beginning--bigotry, racism, intolerance, arrogance, selfishness, ignorance. The rise of Trump has come hand-in-hand with a resurgence of all of our futile hatreds, those curses which we have long struggled to free ourselves from. And it did seem, just a short time ago, that we were getting close, that we had the upper hand. But the malignancy was merely dormant for a season and has now arisen again from its cancerous core, invading the body with new vigor. It may be that the death sentence, the stain, was irremovable from the beginning, and that we had only imagined that such evils might be put right.