"You can't blame every American for the wrongs that its government and leaders have committed," said many Americans.
No one outside their country echoed this ridiculous notion, however.
It is a terrible tragedy that American citizens did not manage to act harmoniously and with conviction to right—or at least to end—the wrongs across the rest of the world that were both perpetrated in their names and made possible only by their knowing acquiescence. If only they had not turned away from higher instinct and rational foresight alike, perhaps the downfall of their society would not have come about in such a fiery and bloody manner. Some historians believe that an American civilization might even have persisted to this day had its people collectively elected to pursue one of the many possible constructive paths to which they had unobstructed access. Instead of taking purposeful advantage of their unprecedented opportunities in that time, Americans made the conscious choice to allow apathy and denial not only to control their own lives but to eventually corrupt all influence they exerted upon the world in turn.
With the ever-billowing smoke of their growing failures suffocating the world around them, they nevertheless danced gaily across a fiery landfill of self-righteous apathy as its unquenchable embers steadily burned away the last vestiges of their humanity - and by the time they realized that they were going to die, they were already dead. If any at all, very few among them likely realized that their demise was the sole fruit of their own laborious self-deceptions. For many decades they had been happy slaves, masters of the art of forging their own weightless and increasingly-invisible collars, but they were also self-indentured to the slow but steady construction of their own great coffin - and, eventually, their neighbors put them to rest in it. The citizens of the rest of the world collectively refused to allow global genocide to continue to follow in the footsteps of American ignorance and selfishness; at a certain point, after all attempts at peaceful resolution, negotiation, and reason had failed, the only possible solution was to stop its march once and for all.
All that remains today of Americans are their tragic celebrations of themselves in the social media records from that time: the trivial details of their wasted time on Earth - trophies to nothing more than the cursory self-acknowledgments of their egos that such activities represented. Like many ancient societies that rose and fell before and after them, the "USA" failed to even consider the possibility of its own inevitable downfall, much less plan for it. Its citizens' knowing-delusions of fundamental immortality was ultimately their fatal flaw.
The petrified nuclear forest that was once middle North America must be taught to current and future generations as exactly what it is: a stark reminder that a broader perspective MUST be cultivated—and, most importantly, must be *observed and acted upon*—by any human civilization that would endeavor to survive itself. The violent, catastrophic loss of what might someday have been a great society is a humbling lesson that can only be heeded or else suffered in future kind: that passivity is a delusion, that inaction is a potential force equivalent to that of any action, and that to abide willful ignorance is to invite inevitable extinction.
- "Histories of the Ancient World," (Holotext, Simms & Mandel, #37 Edition, 2683).
