My Norwegian grandmother died during WWII for something easily treated today. She came to America around 1900, at about 14 and probably, as one of thirteen children, as an indentured servant. My mother and I went to a huge family reunion in 2000, held in Hjelle on Stryn Lake, a place so magical I cried. I returned in 2007 at the request and warning from one of those cousins. “The glaciers are melting,” he said. “They won’t last our lifetime.”
Another cousin is a science teacher and together we took a car ferry up a fiord, ascended a switchback road to the very top of a glacier overlooking the fiord far below.
Here he explained what happens to a mountain. A giant boulder gets a tiny crack. In the winter, water enters the crack, freezes and expands–forcing the crack ever so larger, winter by winter. Eventually, the crack is so large that the two halves split and perhaps one side falls, crumbling into smaller boulders, each with tiny cracks. Repeat. A giant boulder becomes small pebbles.
This is a metaphor for what’s happening in America today. Billions of small rocks split, no longer united as one immense and very solid boulder. Did the North win the Civil War or not?
Or perhaps in a large boulder, water hits just so over and over until an indentation forms. Smaller rocks get stuck in the rushing water, churning round and round until a hole is formed, like the grinding rocks of Indigenous people. The hole traps the rocks, swirling. Nothing escapes. Rocks are doomed to repeat patterns, grinding away foundations.
This is a metaphor for what’s happening in America today. Children schooled in the trapped beliefs of their parents, doomed to repeat these patterns over and over. Constitutional foundations disintegrate, one rule of law at a time.
