And it’s true, compromise doesn’t have the best track record in this land. It’s easy to see why persons of very different views would feel similarly the lure of totality, the appeal of going big, going fast, going all the way. This vision is one of exclusionary totality, not inclusiveness or compromise. It’s a vision that demands that you fight for what you believe, making no concessions, admitting no errors. Let politics be the art of dominance, of getting a margin just big enough to seize control and obliterate those with whom we disagree. Even for those without a taste for dominance, we seem drawn more often toward avoidance and self-exile than to the thankless and seemingly cowardly effort to make ourselves understandable to one another. As the greatest fighter of all time taught, the hands can’t hit what the eye can’t see.
And then the shadow goes to sea, still indifferent to the Earth below, indifferent to the little creatures here, indifferent to these people indifferent to their own histories. Or perhaps we are not indifferent, but just no more capable than butterflies and bees of seeing the long path and of deciding to change it. The Great American Eclipse illuminates, or darkens, a land still segregated, a land still in search of equality, a land of people still trying to dominate each other. When the lovely glow of a backlight fades, history is relentless, just one damn fact after another, one damning fact after another.
America is a nation with debts that no honest man can pay. It is too much to ask that these debts simply be forgiven. But perhaps the strange path of the eclipse suggests a need for reorganization. We have figured out, more or less, how to count every person. We have not yet found a political system in which every person counts equally.
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