Manifest Mistake

But that is not what I want to spend the little time left saying: there are plenty of justifiers of violence thronging the courts already: nothing I could say will be left unsaid. Turn; go back. Scuff the dust of these fifty years, and forget all foreign conflict. The wars are coming home soon enough.

My wife and my father both, last week, spontaneously, said "they're just evil!" 

Challenged, they would have walked it back, referred to media empires and information bubbles. I didn't challenge them. I don't even know that they're wrong. But true or not, it explains nothing. Half the country can't suddenly have achieved pure evil, while the rest of us walk in the ways of virtue. If they're evil, we must be too. And they perhaps perceive our evil just as clearly as we perceive theirs. We are all of us driving to perdition. Maybe we should stop.

A squirrel turns his white belly to the November sun: for a moment it dazzles. Then squirrel and sun are gone.

I am tired of being ill; more tired of being stupid. G.K. Chesterton:

The man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane, but their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument, but by the manifest mistake of their whole lives.