On November 11, 1980, a car filled with writers was making its way along a rain-slick highway to a conference in Madrid. The subject of the meeting was the human rights movement in the Soviet Union, and in the vehicle were some of the movement’s long-suffering activists: Vladimir Borisov and Viktor Fainberg, both of whom had endured horrific abuse in a Leningrad psychiatric hospital; the Tatar artist Gyuzel Makudinova, who had spent years in internal exile in Siberia; and her husband, the writer Andrei Amalrik, who had escaped to Western Europe after periods of arrest, rearrest, and confinement.
Amalrik was at the wheel. Around 40 miles from the Spanish capital, the car swerved out of its lane and collided with an oncoming truck. Everyone survived except Amalrik, his throat pierced by a piece of metal, probably from the steering column. At the time of his death at the age of 42, Amalrik was certainly not the best-known Soviet dissident. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had published The Gulag Archipelago, won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and immigrated to the United States. Andrei Sakharov had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which he was forced to accept in absentia because the Soviet […]
But what about American Exceptionalism, you know the greatest country that has ever existed in the history of the world?
The shining plantation on the hill? There are so many wonderful, capable, caring people amongst our 320 millions why is it the worst rises to the top? Our history from the start shows that too often the worst, the most aggressive, greedy and cruel have risen to the top to create the empire that is rapidly collapsing today.
How wonderfully amazing that we Americans are just like the rest of humanity mostly loving and kind ruled too often by the greedy and power hungry. Vote in November please it is always a choice between lesser evils. Nothing can stop this collapse and we should not try. Maybe we Americans though can rise to the moment as our ancestors did in the election of FDR to rebuild our world without empire/MIC. Reforming and humanizing the economic system, recognizing in word and action that we depend on a vibrant clean natural world, that every day has to be Earth Day or we die.