The empire decays; another beginning

Erudite Partner surveys our broken country as Joe Biden assumes office:

How can you tell when your empire is crumbling? Some signs are actually visible from my own front window here in San Francisco.

Directly across the street, I can see a collection of tarps and poles (along with one of my own garbage cans) that were used to construct a makeshift home on the sidewalk. Beside that edifice stands a wooden cross decorated with a string of white Christmas lights and a red ribbon—a memorial to the woman who built that structure and died inside it earlier this week. We don't know—and probably never will—what killed her: the pandemic raging across California? A heart attack? An overdose of heroin or fentanyl? ...

... Human beings have long built new habitations quite literally from the rubble—the fallen stones and timbers—of earlier ones. Perhaps it's time to think about what kind of a country this place—so rich in natural resources and human resourcefulness—might become if we were to take the stones and timbers of empire and construct a nation dedicated to the genuine security of all its people. Suppose we really chose, in the words of the preamble to the Constitution, “to promote the general welfare, and to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

Can the aroused people who repudiated the particular corruption of the Trump era build something better? At this new beginning, we certainly want to let go our fears and follow our hopes. Read it all.