As If That's the Way It's Supposed to Be

After hours upon hours of studying they decided to take a break and relax for a few hours before meeting up again after dinner. Daniel went downstairs to make sure Max was still breathing, George and Enric walked down the hall to visit Torreka and Karima and Walter could hear their laughter echoing down the wall hallway, and he and Adam rode the elevator up to the first level. Walter frowned as Adam, his hands in his pockets, brows furrowed, rested against the elevator walls with a sigh.
“Hey, you all right?”
Adam looked up surprised and smiled faintly, “Yeah, just thinking.”
“What’s going on? You’ve been distracted all day.”
“I’m worried. It feels like we’re making the same mistakes all over again.”
“Explain,” said Walter, walking out of the elevator and down the hallway.
“You remember what it was like. Trump had, Ryan resigned, Pence was caught in the Russian scandal and we thought we had a great victory and then the war and the race riots. The West Coast in quarantine and that damn White Nationalist winning the next election.”
“And we rose from all of that.”
“After nearly destroying ourselves.”
Walter frowned and led Adam into his room, grateful that Adrian wasn’t there.
“Nothing is easy during a national breakdown.”
“You weren’t in America during the worst of it,” frowned Adam.
“I was there for Wilson’s assassination.”
“But not for Obama’s or Chicago’s South Side Massacre when that asshole sent in the National Guard and they used drones to fire upon us. The compromise we created came out of rivers of blood.”
“That’s the only way to deal with Neo-Nazis,” sighed Walter, “You have to take them out, root and all, and the only way to do that is through blood.”
“But we didn’t,” sighed Adam, pulling up Adrian’s chair and sitting down, and frowning at how hard it was.
“Adrian doesn’t believe in comfort,” Walter explained.
“If Maria’s election has proven anything, we just forced the rats back into the sewers.”
Walter frowned.
“If only they would stay there,” sighed Adam, running a hand through his hair.
“As much as I worry about our country, we can’t focus on it,” said Walter, “It won’t be our home five years from now.”
“But the diseases that plague it will plague our colonies. It’s already starting.”
“What’s happened?”
“Look at how they divvied up the leadership positions. Your team, four white males, three of the four are from Western Europe or the United States. Team III only one female, three white males, all are either Russian or Ukrainian. Team IV, one token female, three Chinese males. The only two teams that are diverse is Team I and my team. That’s two out of five teams.”
“But the make up of the teams themselves are diverse.”
“Is that going to matter if we use Li’s proposal? And, even if we agree to use a democratic approach, you and I both know how easy it would be to twist and corrupt once we land on our individual planets.”
Walter scratched the top of his head as he thought about the Russians and Blazej and the fact that Bao refused to be in the same room as Akira if she could help it.
“I don’t understand how after all these decades we still have to deal with racist bullshit,” sighed Walter.
“Because we never eradicate the roots of racism. We always treat it as the disease, when it’s just the symptom.”
“And what is the disease?”
“False permanence.”
Walter cocked an eyebrow.
“People think status quos last forever. The Black man will always be ten steps behind the White man. The Hispanic will always be caught up in their drug wars. The Arab will always be political backwards and hopeless. America will always be the most powerful nation in the world. It will always be a White, Christian nation. These are things politicians, news anchors, and scholars have promised over and over again. And people fall for them over and over again.”
“This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this sentiment,” said Walter, picking up a stylus and playing with it, “Samira was telling me something similar. She said we needed to allow our colony to fail.”
“She wants it to be a failure?”
“No, but she said we should give it the ability to fail.”
Adam furrowed his eyebrows as he thought it over.
“I was-and am-worried of a fascist, totalitarian state developing in our colonies and she told me I was trying to control the impossible. The more we push our colony in one direction, the bigger the whiplash will be and we could create the scenario we are trying to avoid.”
“We can’t do nothing.”
“No, I’m not arguing that, but I think there is an advantage in giving our colonists flexibility. That would counter this false permanence. Building this notion that change is inevitable and that nothing lasts into our government.”
“The only problem is that could lay the path for stronger government. The very uncertainty could lead to a desire for a strong leader. That’s what happened in the U.S. Mass migration, exponential technological growth, stagnant social, political, and economic development and that asshole Trump is elected.”
“Trump was a symptom. The cause was the Democrats,” said Walter and Adam frowned, “I know how you feel about Obama, but his leadership led to the explosion of his own party and the rise of White Nationalists.”
“It was the Republicans who led to that horror.”
“The Republicans predictably grabbed onto their coattails, but it was the divisions within the Democratic party following Obama’s term that allowed the White Nationalists to become a political power. They crawled out of their rocks after Obama was elected and were ignored because Islamic Terrorist made headlines and because we wanted to congratulate ourselves on living in a post-racial world. The Democrats could have created a new chapter in racial relations if they had paid attention, but they didn’t. They focused more on being the party that ended racism and not preparing for the predicted backlash. They didn’t provide a viable healthcare option, they introduced a healthcare tax. They didn’t address jerrymandering, infrastructural degradation, prison reform, legal abuses. They didn’t even help the unions, one of their strongest sources of voter support. Everything Obama said he would address they either ignored or made a half ass attempt. And some of that can be blamed on the Republicans, but as we know their souls sell for cheap and could have easily been bought. The Democrats acted like Lords after winning a major victory instead of launching a brutal campaign. Our only saving grace was that the Trump administration was just as inept.”
“It wasn’t that simple for Obama’s administration and you know that,” snapped Adam, ready to snort fire, “but I agree that the Democratic party let Obama down and the Clintons are responsible for Trump being elected. If the Democrats had nominated Bernie, Trump would never had seen that White House.”
“It’s not surprising they didn’t. The Democrats can work within a White Nationalist’s system of government. We saw that during Trump’s administration. There was no room for compromise within Bernie’s administration.”
“It’s what we needed,” said Adam.
“Purity doesn’t allow for change or dissension,” said Walter.
Adam ran a hand through his hair.
“The problem is that racism and nationalism isn’t a political problem. You can’t solve it with a party or a political system. You have to have a full solution otherwise it’ll never go away.”
“Adrian believes that destroying the concept of race and culture will solve the problem.”
“Like most of Adrian’s suggestions that works within the abstract, but you can’t wipe out centuries of culture, so it just becomes a matter of whose culture is made the status quo.”
“That’s what I told him but he said maybe at first but-”
“Over time it would change,” Adam finished for him, “I respect him, but he is too abstract.”
“I sometimes fear he’s the only one who can see clearly.”
Adam glanced at him.
“I have a lot ghosts that haunt me and I’m bringing a lot of baggage with me. And I know you’re the same way. I worry how much they affect our decisions.”
“I think that’s Adrian’s problem. He’s disconnected and cut off from the real world. He can’t possibly understand why someone would cling to their race or culture. To him they have no place in the 21st century. I am just as guilty though. I know nothing of the lgbt community and have no interest in it. I never realized how dangerous that was for my constituents until Torreka yelled at me. I tried to change after that, but I had already built the indifference into the party.”
“Your party got a Hispanic lesbian elected into the White House.”
“And what about the deals we had to make to ensure that happened?”
Adam sighed.
“No matter what you do, you end up creating a larger problem further down the line.”
“We’re only human.”
“And now we may become super human. God, what will we destroy then?”
“Hopefully the horrors that survived the 20th century.”
“Will we destroy them or will we only replace them with something worst?”
“That’s the risk we run when we try to recreate the world.”
“I just want a world where I don’t have to justify my existence and my privilege. Where my right to the pursuit of happiness is not questioned and I am not a threat because I am semi-competent.”
“I think we’re in a position to create that world. I just don’t know if we’re prepared to pay the cost it requires,” said Walter.
“Do you trust your team?”
“I trust Daniel and Celestyn.”
“Even though he’s close to Litchmen?”
“He is his own man.”
“Anatoli says he’s too dedicated to Sebastian to be trusted.”
“But you trust Anatoli?”
“Anatoli is honest. He is who he is and he’s done what’s he done and that’s that.”
“Far from it,” said Walter, “Anatoli is an opportunist. He will create dissent where he needs it to be.”
Adam shrugged his eyebrows.
“He’s the one we have to keep in mind when we design our proposal. We need to keep him bond up in laws and procedures otherwise that colony doesn’t stand a chance.”
“He was instrumental in creating the Russian Republic.”
“But recreating the FSB. You haven’t seen some of the reports coming out of the Republic.”
“How are Litchmen and Kaminski different?”
“They never turned their creations on their own people. Never blended government with terror. What they did, they did during war.”
“Does that matter, really?”
“The rules are different in war. You do what you have to, to survive. During peace, the law must be sacred otherwise the system doesn’t work. That is why I am more lenient with Dmitri than I am with Anatoli, despite his behavior towards Blazej. Dmitri was a soldier following orders. Anatoli’s a butcher.”
“Following orders isn’t a viable defense anymore.”
“Well, you know I go back and forth on those trials.”
Adam sniffed humorously and rose.
“I’m sorry, Walter, I didn’t mean to cover old ground.”
“It’s all right. These are things we need to keep fresh in our mind during this process.”
“It almost seems hopeless, doesn’t it?”
“It depends on the goal. Peace across the universe and a stagnant, perfect colony. Hopeless. A colony that can survive and manage its own internal contradictions and bias, difficult, but not hopeless.”