Time for deus ex machina?
Will Americans survive the feverish doomsaying that is getting louder each day?
In ancient Greece, the storyteller Euripides invented a way to save the day when his story developed a hopeless conundrum. He rigged a mechanical crane to lower a new player--usually a mythological god--onto the stage to rescue the players.
Our current discord has an interesting history. There are many trend lines, but one will suffice here.
In the early 1900s, man made an audacious attempt to rework creation through the practice of eugenics, a pseudo-intelligent belief that man could improve God's work. It was a disaster that became a war on the weak.
In my 2016 novel "A Pearl for Kizzy," I told how many American states embraced eugenics. They set up "better babies" programs and sterilization mandates for the feeble-minded.
Eugenics gained support from powerful people across the country, and the U.S. Supreme Court embarrassed the nation when Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote an opinion that embraced the compulsory sterilization of "mental defectives":
"Three generations of imbeciles is enough."
Then came Hitler with a ghastly version of eugenics that led to the Holocaust. After World War II, America came to its senses, but too late to help the victims of eugenics.
Today,........
