Foraging for food, city dump, Dubuque, Iowa. Produce houses dump apples, grapefruit, etc., which are not quite bad. 1940 April. John Vachon, photographer (Library of Congress) (Click on image to view larger)
From Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon in which Charles Mason describes going to the site of what could be the Conestoga Massacre of 1764 where 16 Conestoga men, women and children were cruelly and maliciously slaughtered at the jail in Lancaster where they had sought refuge.
The next Day, he creeps out before Dixon is awake, and goes to the Site of last Year’s Massacre by himself. He is not as a rule sensitive to the metaphysickal Remnants of Evil,– none but the grosser, that is, the Gothickal, are apt to claim his Attention,– yet here in the soil’d and strewn Courtyard where it happen’d, roofless to His Surveillance,– and to His Judgment, prays Mason,– he feels “like a Nun before a Shrine,” as he later relates it to Dixon, who has in fact slept till well past noon, as Shifts and Back-shifts of Bugs pass to and fro, inspecting his Mortal Envelope. “Almost a smell,” Mason quizzickally, his face, it seems to Dixon, unuusually white, “–not the Drains, nor the Night’s Residency,– I cannot explain,– it quite Torpedo’d me.”
“Eeh! Sounds worth a Visit …?”
“Acts have consequences, Dixon, they must. These Louts believe all’s right now, — that they are free to get on with the Lives that to them are no doubt important, — with no Glimmer at all of the Debt they have taken on. That is what I smell’d, — Lethe-Water. One of the things the newly-born forget, is how terrible its Taste, and Smell. In Time, these People are able to forget ev’rything. Be willing but to wait a little, and ye may gull them again and again, however ye wish, — even unto their own Dissolution. In America, as I apprehend, Time is the true River that runs ’round Hell.”
As Americans, we like to think that only “other,” “uncivilized” people engage today in this kind of behavior, that when “we” do it, it’s an aberration, “a few bad apples.”
When you destroy the Rule of Law, this is what you will get. It is not enough to hope that there is a god who will punish those directly responsible, because all who do not act to prevent it are responsible.
Does the political party for which you usually vote harbor and encourage people who routinely seek to violate the rights of others and the rule of law?
Think about that before you pull the lever.
