Too often, I find myself struck by the staggering number of unintended consequences that political actions (typically military in nature) generate long after they’re made. You would think that the US has been a country long enough to recognize that our decisions matter now and in the future. We have enough data, enough history, to evaluate the trends accurately. We can observe the consequences of other nations’ actions from afar and take heed. It should be as simple as looking.
But that’s not the context in which we live.
Our political leadership is required to function in the “now.” As a government, we make decisions with concern for their effect on tomorrow, not next year.
And yet, time, space, nature, and any number of cosmic-scaled phenomena don’t care about our myopia. Time knows that our behavior has ramifications. Whether we’d like them to or not, the battles we wage now influence the relationships of members of the next generations.
For this piece, I’ve stacked two boys wrestling in Émile Friant’s La Lutte into a diminishing pyramid. Early foundational actions are repeated through future generations, with each new layer becoming less than its ancestors simply because it continues a struggle without pause. The smaller figures simply imitate the maneuvers of their supporting predecessors, never looking upward or outward.
Decisions made by the base reduce the substance of the highest members of the lineage.