I’ve been trying to find the right metaphor for the sickness in our country. We keep treating it like a bad case of the flu—a seasonal, temporary illness that we’ll all just “get over” after a fever breaks.
That is a dangerously flawed diagnosis.
What we are suffering from is not a common cold. It is a chronic, latent, and incurable virus. It is a new strain of an old disease. It is Herpes Simplex 3: The Political Strain.
Think about it. A herpes virus is for life. It hides in the nervous system, waiting. It doesn’t show symptoms when you’re healthy. It flares up, ugly and painful, when the host is stressed, run-down, and the immune system is compromised.
That is what is happening to America. The virus—the deep, latent sickness of our racism, our division, our capacity for “othering”—was always there, hiding in the nerves of the body politic. But for a long time, our “immune system” (a shared sense of reality, a respect for institutions, a functioning civil discourse) kept it in check.
Now, the body is sick. It’s stressed, it’s exhausted, and it’s vulnerable.
This was not an accident. This was a poisoning.
This was the “long con” we’ve been deconstructing. It was a hostile external force, the “long shadow from the dacha window,” that saw an opportunity. They didn’t have to force-feed us the poison. They just served it to us, on immaculate surfaces and with the cleanest utensils, presented by charismatic “influencers” and trusted leaders who told us it was not only safe, but exactly what we were hungry for.
And we, as a people, failed to do the one, simple, necessary thing: we failed to read the menu.
We were so hungry for a simple answer, so addicted to the “easy” choice, that we just took their word for it. We never bothered to check the ingredients. We never verified the information. And the most tragic part? The truth was right there, in the “history” section, in the fine print for anyone who had the integrity to look. We just didn’t want to.
The antidote to this poison was simple. It’s basic intellectual hygiene. It’s the act of “mending your own fence” before you criticize your neighbor’s. It’s the act of doing the hard, necessary work of personal responsibility and critical thought.
And the adversary’s true victory? It was in convincing half the population that reading the menu is an act of disloyalty. That to trust the “chef” without question is the only true form of patriotism.
They have successfully compromised our national immune system. We are now a host body that has been tricked into believing the poison is the cure. We are at war with our own T-cells, convinced that the only way to be “free” is to let the sickness win.
This is the grim, but necessary and accurate, map of the battlefield.