I can't blame modern technology for my predilection for distraction, not after all the hours I've spent watching lost balloons disappear into the clouds. I did it before the Internet, and I'll do it after the apocalypse, assuming we still have helium and weak-gripped children.

When black blood was money, the savvy businessman knew to open the vein.

High-minded idiocy pitted against the power of coin.

The words from across the ocean were beaten out of them over time. For simplicity, to erase their identities, to smother uprisings.

How to undo slavery's injury to the mental faculties–so many freed men continued to be enslaved by the horrors they'd endured.

And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes--believes with all its heart--that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn't exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.