I’ve been avoiding a big problem. And this week my vacation forced me to face it. Blankets, literally blankets of brown leaves (mostly oak but also beech and sycamore and buckeye and you name it) have been smothering our yard for months. Why didn’t I rake them in November? I tried, but the tall trees that surround our house just laughed at me—every year they do that—and the leaves kept falling and blowing in. Then the rain and then the snow packed them down into those huge brown blankets.
For most of recorded history, we homo sapiens have been led by autocrats. We have organized ourselves under tribes led by chiefs and kingdoms led by kings. Life under autocrats was better than life under chaos before civilization. It never was fair or nice, but it suited the nature we inherited from our herding animal ancestors, who followed their leaders. Those who strayed from the herd died young.
Then, two centuries ago along came a better idea, democracy. No more kings—let the people rule themselves. That was yesterday in history time. Democracy was a radical invention then, born through violent revolutions, over and over.
