“He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.” —Genesis 3:24
The Gate Closed Behind Us
I used to think there’d be a sign. Something unmistakable. A rupture in the sky. A crack in the marble. A broadcast that made the whole country sit up and say, “So this is how it ends.” But that’s not how Eden closes. It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t even slam. It drifts shut, softly, behind you. And by the time you realize the threshold is gone, you’ve already been locked out.
It ends with a muttering voice in a hallway, a flag raised in the name of something you don’t recognize, a silence from the people who should be shouting. It ends when you feel it, not all at once, but all the way through. Not like lightning, but like a slow ache. This is the aftermath. Not of paradise, maybe. But of a place we were told we belonged. A republic we believed in. A shared story we thought we were part of. And now, we can’t go back.
What We Left and What We Lost
I don’t mean the mythical Eden, the one with fig leaves and snakes and eternal innocence. I mean the one with congressional hearings and paper ballots. The one where facts still held weight and laws still applied. The Eden of three branches. Of voting rights. Of peaceful transitions. The Eden where a president could still be embarrassed.
We were raised in that myth. The garden of institutional trust. Of civic rituals that didn’t feel like theater. Of elections that didn’t require security briefings or contingency plans. Yes, it was flawed. It always was. But there was, at the very least, a sense of shared gravity. A moral center. A boundary line.
We didn’t lose that in a fire. We lost it in comfort. In distraction. In assuming the covenant would uphold itself. We watched the garden rot while arguing over who should water it. We outsourced virtue to our side of the aisle. We replaced civic duty with curated outrage. And when the moment came, we were too stunned to move. Too caught up in the drama of collapse to stop it.
Recognition: When the Veil Falls
It’s like waking up after the fire has already passed through. The walls are still standing, but only because you haven’t touched them yet. The moment you do, the illusion crumbles.
The headlines keep calling it “gridlock,” but there’s no grid and no lock. The courts don’t interpret law; they issue riddles. The Senate doesn’t deliberate; it auditions for cable hits. The president doesn’t govern; he punishes. And the people? They’re not divided. They’re exhausted. Or sedated. Or pretending they don’t notice.
The center hasn’t held because it was never designed to hold weight indefinitely. The scaffolding was meant to be reinforced by participation, not spectacle. But we let it rust. And when it finally groaned under the weight of bad actors and worse faith, all we could do was argue about who broke it.
The Garden Was Paved for a Campaign Rally
Eden didn’t vanish. It was monetized. Branded. Flattened and repackaged as patriotism for sale. The tree of life was carved into podiums. The sword that turned every way now points in only one direction—down. And in the ruins, a new structure rose: not a temple, not a republic, but a marketplace of cruelty, wrapped in the language of liberty.
Freedom became a bumper sticker. Citizenship became a grift. And the old covenant, the one that said we owed each other decency, was broken, printed, and resold as nostalgia. What we have now isn’t democracy. It’s content. The garden has been landscaped into a theme park where everything looks familiar, but nothing grows.
When Collapse Feels Like Confusion
There was a night (I remember it clearly) I stared at the news so long I forgot what year it was! Couldn’t remember who was president. Just that it all blurred together into one grinning face, promising vengeance dressed up as strength. That’s what collapse feels like. Not revolution. Not chaos. Just disorientation. A gnawing sense that something has gone deeply wrong and no one else seems alarmed.
You second-guess yourself. Are you being dramatic? Overreacting? You start rereading founding documents like they might contain a cure. You look for handrails. And find only mirrors.
That’s what this is now. A war on memory. A disinformation ecosystem that turns civic understanding into a fever dream. Collapse isn’t always fire. Sometimes it’s fog.
The News Can’t Say It
The headlines still try to speak carefully. “Democracy under strain.” “Unprecedented legal challenge.” “Rhetoric escalates.” They speak in euphemism, as if language alone can keep the structure intact. But the truth is, the republic is bleeding out. The judiciary has been taken. The president governs like a tyrant and speaks like a troll. And the press, god help it, still pretends this is just another cycle.
But we know better. We feel it in our teeth. Like Cicero felt it when the Roman Senate gave its applause to Caesar. Like the jurists of Weimar felt it when they sentenced truth to silence. Like we feel it now, every time a lie goes unchallenged, every time cruelty wins the applause.
They tell us not to panic. But panic is the wrong word. The correct word is reckoning.
You Can’t Go Back. But You’re Not Powerless.
So here we are. Exiled, but not erased. You can’t go back to Eden. The door’s locked. The gate is ash. The covenant’s in pieces. But you can still be human on the far side of paradise.
You can still carry memory like a torch. You can still say the right thing, even if no one listens. You can still refuse to call evil by a softer name. You can still raise your voice without permission. And you can do it without needing to win. Because the goal is not just survival. It’s testimony.
A Mirror the Size of a Country
We didn’t arrive here only because of them. We got here because we stopped paying attention. Because comfort made us lazy. Because winning replaced wisdom. We became too easily flattered, too easily fooled, too eager to be told we were on the “right side” without having to prove it with our choices.
We let the garden fall while we refreshed our feeds. We performed civic outrage without civic action. We traded our birthright for applause. And now, standing in the ruin, we ask how it all happened so fast.
But it didn’t happen fast. It happened every day we looked away.
What Survives
Honor survives. Maybe not the kind they celebrate in parades, but the quiet kind, the clerk who won’t fudge the count, the teacher who won’t censor the truth, the neighbor who won’t lie about what’s happening just to keep the peace.
These are small acts. They won’t trend. They won’t win elections. But they are seeds. And the garden, before it was a myth, was a place of tending. We can still tend. We can still plant. We can still choose truth over convenience, integrity over alignment, presence over performance.
We are not called to restore Eden. We are called to remember it—and live as if it mattered.
Benediction for a Broken Garden
If you’re still reading, you know.
You’ve felt it. The shift. The ache. The quiet dread that follows civic betrayal.
You’re not wrong. You’re not alone. And you’re not hysterical.
This isn’t just decay. It’s desecration.
This isn’t just dysfunction. It’s design.
This isn’t just mismanagement. It’s malice.
So don’t let them tell you to move on. Don’t let them dress it up with new slogans or cover it with another flag. Don’t let them sell you silence disguised as healing.
Carry the memory. Speak the truth. Refuse the numbness.
And stand anyway.
Because we carry it forward not because we think we’ll win,
but because it must not die with them.
Not in silence.
Not on our watch.
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Thank you for reading, sharing, and keeping this light alive.
You said previously in one of your posts this:
" The light we carry isn’t just political outrage. It’s moral imagination—the refusal to normalize cruelty.
It’s memory—keeping alive the vision of justice even in unjust times.
It’s resilience—the art of enduring without hardening, resisting without becoming what we resist.
It’s generosity—the radical choice to create, to build, to share without replicating empire’s logic of control.
And the light is love. Not sentimental, not soft.
Love as defiance. Love as a weapon against despair. Love that refuses to bow"
It was so beautifully written that I saved it 🙂
With Love we have to start envision first and then to build a new society, a new country and, ultimately a new World 🌎
Otherwise these actual foundations that we called solid are going to crumble ultimately
This reads like the field manual for those of us still standing in the ruins, trying to remember what the garden felt like before it was branded and sold. You’ve captured the ache of the epistemic war, the way collapse hides behind euphemism until we forget what truth even sounded like.
Eden wasn’t just a myth of innocence; it was the memory of coherence. And coherence is what they’ve been dismantling, one algorithm, one law, one headline at a time. The expulsion was never about sin; it was about distraction. Keep people scrolling, and they’ll never notice the gate has closed.
But you’re right: exile doesn’t mean extinction. The work now isn’t restoration, it’s re-cultivation; tending the small acts that make a republic possible again. The clerk, the teacher, the neighbor: that’s the resistance. That’s the replanting.
Economies of Care: https://twvme.substack.com/p/care-economies-as-infrastructure