If you, as I do, have a feeling of general malaise, indeed despair because of a profound sense of chaos and cacophony that pervades the culture, drowning out basic civility and reasonable and rational discourse, you’re not alone—these books were written for you.
The overarching message of all three books of the Trilogy is that hope…and help is on the way!
So I’d like to tell you a story, more of a parable really, the true facts of which are so unbelievable, as to defy even fictional plausibility.
Sorry, but it’s not a feel-good story with a Capraesque Mr Smith Goes to Washington ending….not yet anyway. That’s where you come in…that’s the hope and help part of the story—and THE HOW we get to control how this story ends.
It is the eternal…perpetual tension through the millennia, exacerbated even more now with the ubiquitous reach of technology of today’s culture—the constant never ceasing battle of truth…and hope over fear, cynicism and demagoguery.
Hope is about growth…fear is about limits. Hope points ahead, working for a common good. Cynical fear lives in the past pointing at others, assigning blame. Fear pushes away; hope pulls others closer. For our children’s children and generations to follow, the death of hope would mean the ultimate demise of democratic civilization as we know it.
These novels attempt to explain how, through fictional depiction:
- Since the 1980s, some very rich, very smart, and very evil people—Evil Geniuses—have skillfully executed an insidious assault on the American democracy through the promulgation of radical right neo-liberal social and economic policies.
- Powerful anti-democratic forces, including the state-sponsored Russian Media Mafia and government, and Alt-right propaganda mills though social media platforms by spreading fear, anger and tribal hate, of which I include Fox News channel, could again execute a pernicious concerted canard to surreptitiously and indiscernibly affect, and illegally influence/modify voter behavior.
And to ensure that it can never happen again. Requiring a collective social recalibration, from ME…to WE…and the return to a sense of shared sacrifice and community.
We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.
– Martin Luther King Jr.
But that arc does not bend toward justice by itself…without the constant and vigilant guidance of those who are willing and percipient participants in the sometimes violent, oftentimes messy process, of the defense of democracy. Without your help. To that end, the first step is to vote responsibly not just in national elections, but it is imperative that local, and county elected officials, and most importantly the state executive, legislative and judicial offices, be elected who will faithfully, fairly, without political bias, administer and regulate the bedrock of democracy, the vote.
As the sagacious Irish Priest tells Maria Caravaggio, filled with despair in the jaws of the Great Depression, “And when ya pray, lassie…don’t ferget ta move yer feet. Noli timere, child…be not afraid”