“It’s my sort, the Responsible Citizens who’ve felt ourselves superior because we’ve been well-to-do and what we thought was ‘educated,’ who brought on the Civil War, the French Revolution, and now the Fascist Dictatorship. . . . It’s I who persecuted the Jews and the Negroes. I can blame no Buzz Windrip, but only my own timid soul and drowsy mind. Forgive, O Lord!” – Doremus Jessup, protagonist of It Can’t Happen Here (Sinclair Lewis, 1935).
Jessup, as the voice of his creator Lewis, saw what We the People refuse to see, what our false gods and their false promises enable us to not see.
There is no escape.
There is no excuse.
You and I are at fault. You and I are to blame. Your actions and mine are killing society, killing the planet upon which society depends.
What are We going to do about it?
Ain’t none of it gonna be pretty. And they rode the last guy who dared to speak the facts, and spell out what it was going to cost to address them, out on a rail. That was a decade ago.
There’s always the bumper sticker.