I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life.

I’m as worried about this upcoming election as I am about the pandemic, but I think the consequences of the election will be with us longer.

I worry that neither candidate will be able to articulate any kind of persuasive case for his election: the incumbent because the nation will have had its nose rubbed in the man’s inadequacies and unfitness a few too many times by then; and also that Joe Biden may not be able to succinctly and persuasively diagnose his opponent’s, but more importantly, the nation’s, ills, or to describe a path of healing and restoration. At that point the country, with no father figure to hold its hand and guide it in something like the right direction, will have to be mature enough and sane enough to choose life.

The death urge is common to the adolescent male everywhere and everywhen. It expresses itself in wanton risk-taking, casual cruelty and thoughtless contempt for authority—especially moral or intellectual authority. For most, it is a necessary stage of development. For some, it is a point of arrested development. It is an undeniable facet of the American (and especially Southern) character at this point, described best in the fiction of Faulkner and O’Connor. And so, at this precise moment, the young nation finds itself at a rare inflection point—one way lies permanent and accelerated decline, a retreat into superstition, conspiracy theory, kleptocracy and authoritarianism. Economic primacy will cross the Pacific, never to return. Moral leadership and the championship of Enlightenment values will re-cross the Atlantic to the capitals of Europe—London may snap out of its decline; Berlin may find a way to keep the EU together; even Madrid could become the socialist vanguard. Everyday Americans have unknowingly surfed on the waves of these primacies for decades; if the waves break, we will spend the rest of our lives paying for it in a thousand ways. To throttle a metaphor to death in the bathtub.

Another way lies an uncertain and difficult future, but one chosen with eyes open. This begins the path of adulthood. Taking responsibility, understanding that the world is too dangerous to go through it with anything less than a gimlet eye—this is the hard and frequently unsatisfying work of making the world a little better a little bit at a time. It is the only path that ends with us leaving even potentially a better world than we found. Ultimately, people only choose this path out of hard-won experience—there is nothing particularly attractive about it at first, but we come to realize the alternative is oblivion.

The seductions of the death cult are very real. Against them, a pragmatic and sane argument for life sometimes fails. And so I worry.