An Answer in the Form of a Question
Weeding a stack of papers and articles the other day, I came across something I’d clipped from the November 2007 Atlantic. In “The Future of the American Idea,” the magazine’s editors asked various contributors to share extremely concise thoughts on, well, the future of the “American Idea.” Some were good, some were bad–the whole exercise seemed a little stagey–but David Foster Wallace hit it out of the park in “Just Asking“:
In still other words, what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?
Yet another reason to miss Wallace.