@22 yes. exactly. the hard thing, the very hard thing, is to discriminate btw what is good and what is bad in a thing, rather than consign the thing as a whole as good or bad. the US is both a political formation that has perpetrated genocide, one of history’s cruelest forms of slavery, hiroshima and more. it is also history’s most successful example of transcending the conflictual nationalism that has rendered human experience a constant drumbeat of genocide, and threatens again to kill us all.

@22 i really love the famous Solzhenitsyn quote, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.”

What is true of individual humans is true of human communities as well. We are complicated.

@22 i think @Daojoan’s “and” formation is right on. all these things are true, and to try to reduce them to one, a simple story, villain or saint, is to do violence to truth and to our capacity to act intelligently, constructively, as we go forward.