Understanding America Through the Eyes of an Amazing Young Russian

Many of us are trying to make sense of the deadening of Americans’ souls and the demise of our traditional values of compassion, community, responsibility, and mutual support.

This whole thing became much clearer in just the few minutes it took me to read this article in The New Yorker, about a 21-year-old Russian, Yegor Zhukov, on trial for “extremism.”  This is the single most powerful thing I have read all year.  Most of the content is the breathtaking statement the young man made at the conclusion of his court appearance in Moscow last Wednesday, but it’s introduced by these amazing words, which, btw, was precisely my take-away: “I (translated it and published it) because it is a beautiful text that makes for instructive reading. Parts of it seem to describe American reality as accurately as the Russian one, and parts of it show what resistance can be. 

Prediction: If this civilization can’t make some degree of progress in the direction of his core message here, it’s doomed–at very least to authoritarianism, if not to total annihilation.