I am sitting here at the keyboard looking out over the marsh toward Sapelo Island and the horizon. The marsh is the defining feature of this coastal stretch, expansive and alluring in its promise of adventure. I’m at the FishCamp, a rustic cabin near Darien, Georgia, roughly 25 miles north of St. Simons Island. It is stone quiet, absolute solitude. Emotionally, I pinch myself to celebrate my good fortune.
This has become my new place to hide out just as I did at Potlatch in the north Georgia mountains, my paradise for over thirty years. Sometimes I think I should have lived my life in the nineteenth century when the pace was slower and the news was measured in weeks or months. Call me a recluse or a curmudgeon; I plead guilty, especially now that I am closing in on my late “golden years.”
As I sit here in peace this April 2026, I vacillate between feeling guilty for my health and well-being and a sense of outrage for those whose lives are so wickedly uprooted by war and the evil ambitions of unscrupulous leaders. For them, death comes in the night not from the luxury of old age. For now, I’m embarrassed for our country, a 250 year old refuge for immigrants, which has sought justice and virtue, as we stumble toward defeat and destruction by our own hand.
We were born in revolution guided by Washington, survived a civil war thanks to Lincoln and steered through the depression by FDR. Always, our leaders rose to the occasion, compelled by virtue and a sense of noblesse oblige. Whatever the cost, however acrimonious, we came together and prevailed. Today the specter of Hobbes haunts us and our government is corrupt.
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), an English philosopher, is best remembered for the Leviathan (1651) in which he argues that humanity’s natural condition is a state of perpetual war, fear and amorality.