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As a nation, we have been trapped in the darkness, under the command of trolls.
We have endured their lies and we have bent under the weight of their abuse. We have been told that recognizing them as trolls, and protesting at the many crimes they committed in our name, amounted to disloyalty; that to see them for what they were made us allies of the even greater monsters arrayed against us. Moved by fear, shackled by apathy, too often frightened into silence by the rattling of chains, we have closed our eyes as our treasure was robbed, as our character was poisoned, and as all our claims to nobility were rendered mockery. Worse yet, we have spent so much time hidden away from the sun that even as we stumble blinking into relative light, we face a world that our lords sullied and brutalized in our name, and that sees all of us as extensions of the scaled, leprous things who commanded us.
The rest of the world is correct. We forgot that we came from a long line of people who fought for principle instead of expediency, for right instead of wrong. We allowed the forces of corruption to frighten us with the faces of our enemies, and back us into corners too shadowed for us to see that the chief difference between them and those enemies was not one of character but of degree. We ignored the screaming of people strapped down in tiny rooms, the suffering of our fellow citizens in cities where water had started to rise, the increasing documentation that the creatures we trusted to serve us found sustenance only when our lives were befouled.
Worst of all our crimes, we forgot that for all our failures, all our missteps, all the sins that stain a past we have always sought to idealize, that we were still what the best of us have called the last, best hope of man on Earth, the inspiration for a species that has all too often known nothing but poverty of both hope and spirit. We allowed ourselves to be lied to, and beaten down. By the time we found the way into the light, our own faces were tarred with the same mud that those trolls wore as war paint.
We are scarred now. We are more beaten down, more haggard. It is more difficult for us to see a shining future. The road before us is cratered and uncertain, many of its once golden paving stones carried off by those who claimed ownership of our trust. It is hard to tell whether that path leads to clear skies or back into the subterranean places we just left. The dangers up ahead are so formidable that we might well take a few steps forward and then, frightened by what we see, return to the control of the devils we know – who are, make no mistake, still among us, whispering their poison in our ears. The frightened wish we could return to the regime that encouraged us to cower. The hopeful know that if we retreat we might never find our way to the sunlight again. The trolls caper in our midst, frantic, knowing that this might be their last chance to define our course.
Where are we headed? I don’t know. Not only as a nation, but also as a species, we have always spent more time in dark places than in enlightened ones. Not only as a nation, but as a species, we have always cringed from the shafts of sunlight breaking through the rickety structures we erect to hide the sky. Not only as a nation, but as a species, we have returned again and again to the control of those who flourish only in the shadows. The trend has always been toward the light, but we have backtracked more than not, and sometimes walked in circles. This path seems promising, but it might be as much a dead end as some of the ones we explored before it. There’s no way to tell, except to walk it.
But right now, we survive. We’re here.
And today, that’s enough.
January 20th 2009.
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