It was easy to think of the ways to fight and administration wrought with corruption, defined by greed, and blinded by a twisted ideology. But read history. In its annals one will find pages of fights documented of the same people fighting the same enemy time and time again.

It becomes clear that the fight that needs to be addressed is not only a political one, but a personal one as well. It becomes obvious that the horrors of history, of human-brought destruction, evil, greed, and violence are the symptoms, and not the causes of dictators, profiteers, and authoritarians. The cause of our killing the world and ourselves is, in fact, the values that we hold.

Wendell Berry said it best when he wrote: “We are familiar enough with the nature of American salesmanship to know that it will be done in the name of the starving millions, in the name of liberty, justice, democracy, and brotherhood, and to free the world from communism.”*

If what we value is consumption and ease, and only those things, then we can wish for nothing other than the world we live in and the continued fight against rank stupidity. It is the values that we hold that have gotten us here. We have to change what we value, and why we value the things that we do to end the cycle of a history filled with horror and disillusion.