Quotes from Liberation Day

by George Saunders

I am going, friend, I am all but gone, I believe you prideful and wrong but I have no desire, now, to cure you. Your wrongness was an idea I had. I am all but gone. My idea of your wrongness will go with me. Your rightness is an idea you are having. It will go with you.

Why? Why must this be? Is there not abundance enough and beauty to support all in peace, were that the general intention?

There is.

But peace is not the general intention.

“I guess one never realizes how little one wants to be kicked to death until one hears a crowd doing that exact same thing to someone nearby,” I say.

If you’ll allow me a crude metaphor (as I’m sure you, the King of Las Bromas de Fartos, will): a guy comes into a dinner party, takes a dump on the rug in the living room. The guests get excited, yell out in protest. He takes a second dump. The guests feel, Well, yelling didn’t help. (While some of them applaud his audacity.) He takes a third dump, on the table, and still no one throws him out. At that point, the sky has become the limit in terms of future dumps.

For, whatever Mr. U. may in the future give me to Speak, I will never enjoy it again, any more than would a puppet, picked up off the floor, enjoy the suddenly manipulating hand.