We are living through generations’ failure to have created something better. Now America burns as the world weeps, and it is for us to put out the flames.

My generation, the “end of history” kids, came of age at the dawn of the era of the things which might have been. And all their trials and terrors and ghastly wonders. All the things which our ancestors might have wrought but would never have lived to see. And we live among it now, and it is us, and we are that which they made in their own eras of wonton foolery.

I am profoundly conflicted by what I am about to do. Conflicted because I never expected Field Blends to be released the week America burned, at a time during which so many around the world have so recently died. Conflicted because I don’t want anything I have to say in this moment to be confused with promotion of the book itself. And, more than anything, conflicted because I am keenly aware that I cannot speak from the perspective of having been personally injured by the sins of the system against which many thousands are now rebelling.

Put another way, it would be profoundly wrong of me to claim that I know what others are experiencing here, that I understand how they feel, because in doing so I would trivialize their pain by selfishly making it my own. This is why the phrase “all lives matter” is such a hideous response to the rallying cry that “black lives matter”. Because saying so hijacks and redirects the real pain of others to be inclusive of one’s own, implicitly saying that the real pain of others is insufficient on its own.

So I am mindful of the wisdom of two great men from a generation past as I sit down to write. The first is that of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. telling us that “There comes a time when silence is betrayal.”

The second is that of U.S. President John F. Kennedy who said in his eulogy of the poet Robert Frost:

If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential […] But democratic society — in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation.

I wrote Field Blends to be both joyful of the world’s beauties and melancholy of its failures, to question the state of our society and culture and political life. To give the reader cause for introspection. And, if I advocate anything at all, it is a full-throated defense of the notion that we need one another—in the words of the American folk singer Arlo Guthrie—“not just individual people, but that’s cities and towns, too. States and countries and continents... We can’t ever let nothin’ make us afraid to do anything that’s right.” (You’ll find that line of his as part of a timely story that begins in minute 2:49 of his recording of Amazing Grace on Spotify or Apple Music - please listen.)

So this week I’ve found myself re-reading Chapter Twenty which, among other things, finds three well-off friends of different stripes debating whether our current crises have been crafted by a system that is right, wrong, or insane. One of these friends says to the other two:

“Listen, if enough people think the system is broken, then it doesn’t matter what good ideas you think you had when you created or perpetuated it. It doesn’t matter how you feel about some dead conservative president from an idolized past you barely remember. It doesn’t matter whether he or you or anyone in between was right or wrong, then or now. It just doesn’t fucking matter.”

The debate continues for a few more moments before the same fellow speaks up again:

“The point is that it doesn’t matter what you think is a right or wrong idea. When you fail to create a better vision, when we’re living life in our beautiful homes and flying first class whenever we leave them, when we fail to give people any alternative to whatever form of hopelessness they have, then someone, something, some idea will emerge. And you might not like it, but you, well—not you personally—but you, you had your chance and didn’t produce a better vision.”

Kennedy understood the danger in a society shaped by physical power yet devoid of true liberation, articulating it so well in a passage written in the original draft but ultimately left unsaid in his eulogy for Frost:

We take great comfort in our nuclear stockpiles, our gross national product, our scientific and technological achievement, our industrial might — and, up to a point, we are right to do so. But physical power by itself solves no problems and secures no victories. What counts is the way power is used — whether with swagger and contempt, or with prudence, discipline and magnanimity. What counts is the purpose for which power is used — whether for aggrandizement or for liberation. “It is excellent,” Shakespeare said, “to have a giant’s strength; but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.”

A poverty of true and decent leadership—above all else—marks our present era. Though I take comfort in the hope that my generation, the Millennials—through tireless effort and vision of decency—might look forward to the same great future for America and the world that we share with Kennedy’s closing words at Frost’s memorial:

I look forward to a great future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose. I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future.

Through tireless effort and vision of decency. Tireless effort. Vision of decency.

When someone close to us dies, it is left to the living to do the real work of shouldering future’s burdens long after the memories and platitudes have disappeared from social media. To choose hope from despair, intellectual fervor from backwardness, a compassionate and fruitful future from the sameness of the sedentary. This era—spoilt fruit of generations’ failure to have created something better—this era must end.

America burns as the world weeps, and it is our moment to illuminate it more brightly than flames ever could.