Something I wrote During the George Floyd Riots

The older I get, the more strongly I believe that the most important thing we can do is to defend civilization. There is no guarantee that this astonishingly rich world we have built will endure; plenty of other civilizations have collapsed or faded back into anarchy and village life. We have to defend it against all kinds of threats: random violence, police corruption, ethnic hate, divisive politics, environmental poisons, outside enemies with hypersonic missiles. We especially need to defend it against forgetting. We are too quick to forget dangers once they fade from the headlines, too quick to forget lessons learned in the fires of World War and violent revolution. I am a liberal, which means I think things could be better and support various reforms intended to make them so. But I never forget that my life depends, not on my party winning, but on the survival of our civilization in the face of a chaotic universe.