The Darkness is always around us.
It searches for us in the dark teatime of the soul. It tries to drag us down into nothingness. Usually we resist it.
Not always.
Wealth and fame are no immunity from the Darkness. Talent doesn’t make you immune. Knowing it, being able to name it, doesn’t mean it won’t come for you. I’m not immune to it.
We don’t know what leads people to choose eternal Darkness. We can’t know. It’s a secret they take to the grave. As with mass shootings, we’re desperate to know, but our souls are private worlds.
We think celebrities like Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade are special, but they’re just people. We also think America is special. The lesson of our time is that it’s not.
The idea of America has always been built on its denying the Darkness, but Darkness has always been here. It was a snake under the table when the Constitution was being written. It remained there, despite everything, after the Civil War. It remained there after World War I and World War II, spreading its tentacles through the “Banana Republics” of Latin America. The Darkness wasn’t destroyed by the Civil Rights movement. It just went underground.
While we pretended to have beaten the Darkness, it continued to grow in the American soul, despite the warnings of George Washington and Dwight D. Eisenhower that trying to police the world or build a military-industrial complex threatened everything we called our light. Now it has come out to play.
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