Status Updates From Our Only World: Ten Essays

But you can't run a landscape, any more than you can run your life, indefinitely in a state of emergency. To live your life, to live in your place, you have got to bring about a settlement that does not involve you continuously in worry, loss, and grief.

There is pleasure in the work of maintenance, the redemption of things worn or broken, that must go on almost continuously.

And so we have lost patriotism in the old sense of love for one's country, and have replaced it with an ignorant, hard-hearted military-industrial nationalism that devours the country.

But there can be no balance between freedom and secret police, universal suspicion, and tyranny. There is only a choice. If we have the courage, we will choose freedom, and we will use it to oppose our government's frivolous and dangerous secrecy, which it imposes upon us under the claim of "security" but really to hide its abuse of power and shame.

We have been so thoughtless and careless of our freedom for so long that by now we cannot see that our assumed right to be limitlessly violent would finally bring us to a violence against freedom that may destroy it.

Why should we continue to believe that our government is uniquely to be trusted with our weapons of mass destruction, whereas other nations are not to be trusted with theirs?