If you find a small pool of ice this winter, kneel next to it, and place your flattened hand upon it and press slowly and evenly until the surface fractures.
Look at those lines of fracture – dozens of microcracks, each a fault line spreading out from the pressure points in ways no one could have anticipated. Think about the strain each one of those cracks reveals. Think about the brittleness of the ice. Think about how close the entire pool is to a catastrophic collapse.
That is where we are as a nation today.
One can lose track of all that troubles us – multiplying climate change disasters, the threat of AI, the overwhelming threat of a US oligarchy to democracy itself, the insidious nature of social media in destabilizing relationships, encouraging and rewarding stupidity and even undermining the fabric of what is real, the threat to abandon Ukraine and other democracies to the pressure of Putin and other dictators and terrorists. We are witnessing fault lines cracking open or growing deeper every day.
Right now though, most importantly, we are eleven months out from the most vital Presidential election since 1860. Trump is ahead in the polls.
Now think of that ice pool as a deep lake whose ice cannot be trusted. If those polls are accurate and presage a Trump restoration, then tens of millions of us are running joyously out onto that ice far from shore. They are jumping up and down. They are screaming for him, lost inside dreams of resentment and vengeance that have the probability of being a nightmare for all of us.
I am not alone in this: often, more and more, I awaken at night, and in my mind’s eye, I see what might happen – that we become a dominion of beasts.
