Shame

Can you believe it? More than three years have passed since I last posted. In that time, my wife and I moved from California to Texas  and we've been busy resettling. Is that the source of my shame? No. My shame is rooted in an unkind thought and I felt need of purging it. Please bear with me.

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​Paramount+ is streaming the cult classic, Jericho, a postapocalyptic story first aired in 2006. It is a moderately watchable series starring has-beens and wannabes. Watchable once. I wouldn’t do it again. However, it took my wife longer to recognize it and I sat through the first two episodes with her. I’m glad I did. The end of the second episode inspired an interesting thought.
     At the end of the second episode, the townspeople of Jericho, a small rural community in Kansas escape to shelters as a storm threatens to immerse them in nuclear fallout from the device that destroyed Denver. The final scenes feature one of the edgier characters who has intercepted a radio broadcast in Morse Code, plotting American cities lost in the attack. The camera zooms in as he places a red pushpin at each location. As the scene fades, the camera focuses on his hand removing pushpins from a drawer where they are stored.

​This series inspires many thoughts. Were we worried about nuclear war in 2006, fully fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union? If not, what was going on in the world at that time that might inspire fear?
     The political landscape following the 2004 elections generally favored the Republican Party and the Democrats were casting about feverishly for a new strategy to motivate their Rainbow Coalition. The one they settled upon would emerge over the next twenty years. Fear. It’s not hard to imagine that stories reviving the specter of nuclear holocaust would be helpful launching the campaign. Climate Catastrophe and Pandemic took time to nurse into global panic.
     Beginning at the end of the Nineteenth Century, the Industrial Revolution began a massive migration from rural America to its cities. In those early days, there was nothing political about it. People were simply following the jobs. However, it became political as city life took its toll on individual self-reliance.
Industrial and commercial employment occupied everyone’s full attention and urban dwellers became dependent on others for everything else, including the most fundamental needs, food, shelter, and clothing. Zoning laws forced city dwellers onto streetcars and subways. More importantly, zoning laws were just the first step in bending individual will to the will of community leaders. Thus, America became politically Balkanized.
     Look at the political map below. That is the color pattern of political Balkanization. Americans have divided themselves between those who are free and those who have freed themselves from the responsibility that attends freedom. 

While all of this is speculation, though interesting it may be, it is not the interesting thought inspired in me by the closing scene of the second episode. No, it is something more perverse.
     As I watched those push pins marking the cities lost to nuclear attack, I thought to myself that if a peer enemy were capable of such a surgical attack, it would instantly and irrevocably alter America, likely not in the manner intended. It brought a smile to my face.
     Instantly, I was ashamed of myself, but only a little.