Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

I finished Don Winslow's "The Border" yesterday.  It's almost 700 pages and intense, but a great if harrowing look at the drug "war" in our country and also the corruption in Washington, D.C.  His characters are alive, and his conclusions are profound and terrifying.  One of his characters says in the book that he really thought our country was "better than this".  That is the feeling I had in 2000 when our Supreme Court stopped the counting of the ballots, then when we started the Iraq War, then when Trump won the election.  Now when I see the divisiveness in our country I don't discount it, because really, there have always been these polar opposites:  slavery/abolition, sufferage/denying women the vote, no woman President/the need to women to sit in that seat, prochoice/antichoice, medical care for all/only for the rich, unions/antiunion, etc.  I can't see how we can reconcile these John Wayne myth believers with a sense of community and interrelatedness.  But I know the first step is to see it clearly:  the contradictions, power lines and the poorly educated masses, who have never practiced critical thinking.  We need to be fighting for knowledge of history, of science, of how money moves and what capitalism's pitfalls are.  Everything is a gray area, and black and white will be the destruction of us all.