In the third part of his tri-partite weekly column, Andrew Sullivan broods in New York on the fracturing of his favorite spot of the outer Cape Cod, the disappearance of the dunes he thought eternal:
Sometimes I wonder when we look back on this age, and its awful politics, and disgusting discourse, if we are actually missing the real story. The vandalism we are doing to our political way of life may at some point be repairable. Perhaps a future president will be able to reconstruct the discourse, or bind some of the wounds, or abate the tribalism. Perhaps the American people will rediscover resources of empathy and civility and reason that seem to have abandoned us for the moment.
But the dunes? They tell me that nature can, at some point, bring them back, that breaches this great can eventually be healed by time and new currents and tides. But the reemergence of a landscape inevitably takes far longer than its destruction. And the grief is as real as the wait is long.
Andrew, it’s called climate change, and many of us worry more about that than we do about our politics, as horrifying as some of our brethren have become in their pursuit of stasis.
