Lessons

by Ian McEwan

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Distale Neuropathie.

from feminist critics. But I have stupid men too. Life is messy, everybody makes mistakes because we’re all fucking stupid and I’ve made lots of enemies among these

young Puritans for saying so.

prostatic dysplasia—benign,

By what logic or motivation or helpless surrender did we all, hour by hour, transport ourselves within a generation from the thrill of optimism at Berlin’s falling Wall to the storming of the American Capitol?

Now, from Jerusalem to New Mexico, walls were going up. So many lessons unlearned. The January assault on the Capitol could be merely a trough, a singular moment of shame to be discussed in wonder for years. Or a portal to a new kind of America,

Only the backward look, the well-researched history could tell peaks and troughs from portals.

Would the global rash of racist nationalism yield to something more generous, more constructive? Might

reverse the current great extinction of species? Could the open society find new and fairer ways to flourish? Would artificial intelligence make us wise or mad or irrelevant? Could we manage the century without an exchange of nuclear missiles?

There were nations run by well-dressed criminal gangs intent on self-enrichment, kept in place by security services, by the rewriting of history and passionate nationalism. Russia was just one. The USA, in a delirium of anger, delusional conspiracies and white supremacy, could yet become another.

a bitter kernel contained within the shell of the greater matter, the earth’s heating, the disappearing animals and plants, the disrupted interwoven systems of oceans, land, air and life, beautiful and sustaining entanglements

barely understood as we forced change upon them.

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