We face a world that is changing, for some too fast and others not fast enough. We are not prepared, though many in our Liberal corner of our Liberal state on the far edge of America believe we are immune to the mayhem. We are not.

It’s the sense of inevitability that’s so frightening. That we’ve entered a land of shadows and are unlikely to return to the safety we once believed was our inherited place in the sun.

We may be witnessing the sacrifice of “truth.”

It was probably always going to happen. “American exceptionalism” was an illusion including equal parts luck, geography, hubris, suppression, immigration, the labor of slaves and politics enlightened by the brilliance of a handful of very smart men and women.

Other countries had one or more of those ingredients, but America had an abundance.

The founders warned us over and over not to take it for granted. We did, and now our America weeps black tears that spread like a stain, tears of outrage, tears of stymied entitlement, self-righteous tears of imagined injury, tears of pain we relish instead of soothe.

We no longer have cohesion. We have devolved into separate identities that no longer seek to understand. We hurl words like rocks, intending to hurt rather than communicate.

Not long ago it seemed, even through turmoil, there was recognition that even if this was who we were, it was not who we wanted to be. There were guardrails to our disagreements. Those seem to have fractured now, as we constantly tested their limits.

Now we’re willing to crush those who disagree with us, to embrace violence or elements of fascism to remake our world, willing to burn the Constitution that has protected ALL of us and is needed as much now as any time in history.

This was on display this week in Congress, as Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) twisted words of three (female) university presidents, including University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill who was trying to defend free speech while acknowledging the need for limits on behavior. Rep. Stefanik turned that distinction between speech and action into an accusation that Magill defended genocide.

Rep. Stefanik played a dishonest, shameful game. When Magill resigned after the hearing, Stefanik reportedly gloated, “One down, two to go.”

Trump may be an accelerant, fuel poured on an already smoldering fire, but he’s not ultimate cause. Those who shout down speakers on campus, or demand firing of professors who challenge their assumptions, or insist those who share history be terminated because they cause “discomfort” also advocate an intolerance nearly religious in fervor.

They too seek a monochrome society, just one that mirrors their identity. That this society is of many viewpoints and eras seems wrong to them. So they push as hard and as fast as they can, and label those who push back as immoral, ignorant, unacceptable.

Others profit by using fear to turn us against each other, cause us to become anxious about the mere existence of “unorthodox” views. They dissect sentences to find something to accuse as we begin a descent into flavors of fascism, left and right, with their false promises of a more simple world.

But it’s not simple and is about to become even more complex, with the advent of intelligent technology that imagines a different world, in words and pictures manufactured in nanoseconds, that we can’t tell is not the world we live in.

And if we can’t tell what’s real and what’s not, which we used to do through discussion, then there is no longer anything that can be called “truth.” There is no easy path back from that nightmare, once encountered on this path into an already difficult future.

~ ED