Understanding what has really polarized America

I came across a dark little fiction not long ago, a YouTube tale set in a place that never was, called Havenwood. In the story there were seven sisters who tended the land with ritual care. They did not age. They healed cows and mended breech births. They could coax abundance from soil and bones and breath. In return, the town prospered. No famine. No plague. No ruin beyond repair.

Except there was a price.

No one in Havenwood could become what they might have been. No one left. No one risked. No one changed. Possibility itself was tithed to the sisters. The town received comfort and plenty, and gave up the future. It was a bargain for stasis. It was prosperity that did not grow. It was a clock that did not tick.

The story named its fear plainly. Immortality for one can become stagnation for the many. The beneficiaries were not vampires with fangs. They were caretakers, soft voiced and steady handed, who guarded a field where nothing ever truly died and, therefore, nothing ever truly lived.

The tale is fiction. Yet it rang like a struck bell.

From campfire to lab bench

Once the image of Havenwood had lodged under my skin, I found myself looking out at our world with new eyes. The question rose of its own accord. Are there people, right now, who are pursuing immortality in earnest?

The answer is yes. There are companies with vaults of money and brilliant scientists working to tame the chemistry of age. There are labs seeking to erase cellular scars and rewind the body’s clocks. Unity Biotechnology has chased the quiet cull of senescent cells. Calico has funded immense basic research on the biology of aging. Altos Labs and Retro Biosciences have poured lifetimes and fortunes into reprogramming the epigenetic code. The Buck Institute and the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing have tilled the deep soil of discovery that makes such ventures thinkable at all.

Not one of them has conquered death. Not yet. Perhaps not ever. That is not the point. The point is the posture. The point is the direction of the gaze. In boardrooms and clean rooms, in headlines and hope, a philosophy is taking shape. It does not meet mortality as an inevitability to be dignified. It treats death as a defect in the machine.

This is where Havenwood’s fiction becomes a mirror. Because what it reflects is not only a scientific project. It is a spiritual one.

The two ways through the world

There are, as I see it, two ways to be alive.

One way is the mortal way. This way hears a clock. It knows that life is precious because it ends. It plants trees whose shade we will not see. It builds schools for children we will never meet. It saves a river and a language and a song because the river and the language and the song are not ours to keep. It accepts that grief is the tax we pay for love. It turns outward. It gives.

The other way is the hoarder’s way. This way pretends not to hear the clock. It acts as if there will always be more. More time. More power. More territory. More attention. It builds moats and vaults and cages and calls them safety. It freezes what it owns so that nothing can take its place. It denies that grief has a rightful home, then lives inside grief’s shadow without a name for it. It turns inward. It keeps.

The first way is tied to existential truth. Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard’s faith rests on the leap because the abyss is real. Albert Camus finds rebellion and tenderness because meaning cannot be guaranteed by any god or king. Martin Heidegger speaks of being toward death as a clarifying lens. The mortal way is not morbid. It is honest. It is adult.

The second way is a kind of modern alchemy. The old adepts brewed elixirs and sought philosopher’s stones. The new adepts culture cells and edit genes. The symbols have changed. The appetite has not. I have called this posture technological transcendentalism. It dreams of lifting the self out of history, out of decay, out of the commons, out of obligation, out of the cycle that binds us to one another. It does not want to be human. It wants to be an exception.

The gardener and the hoarder

If you want an image for the first way, picture a gardener. The gardener saves seeds. The gardener prunes not to diminish, but to bring the rose to bloom. The gardener tends what came before and prepares what will come after. The gardener lives with seasons in the body. To be mortal is to learn the grammar of winter and spring. To be mortal is to compost what we cannot keep and feed the roots.

If you want an image for the second way, picture a hoarder. The hoarder blocks the door with boxes. The hoarder stacks up newspaper towers until the rooms cannot be used. The hoarder keeps because the hoarder fears, and the keeping grows the fear. To hoard is to deny the season. To hoard is to choose airless rooms over changing weather. Hoarding does not preserve life. It mummifies it.

There is a cruder metaphor I once heard, and I have never forgotten it. Immortality would be like wearing the same pair of underwear forever. At first you laugh. Then you flinch. You can feel it, how a thing that is fine for a day or a month would become unbearable if it never changed.

Call it silly. I call it honest.

For me, this is Existential Humanism versus Technological Transcendentalism. I know those sound like heavy, academic words, and most people who don’t wade through philosophy books may not know exactly what they mean. But here’s the truth: you don’t need to. You’ve felt it. You’ve lived it. One way says that because our lives are finite, we must create, give, and plant for others. The other says that because we fear endings, we must hoard, control, and try to escape the cycle altogether. These are the two ways within the world, and they are colliding in our time with a ferocity we can no longer ignore.

The burden of forever

Literature teaches this lesson in parable after parable. Anne Rice gave us vampires who are beautiful and broken by endlessness. The myth of Tithonus gives us a man granted immortality without youth, who withers without release. The Wandering Jew must walk the earth without a homecoming. Even the ancient figure of Midas carries the same warning. What you turn to gold cannot feed you. What you make untouchable cannot embrace you back.

The seven sisters of Havenwood are in this lineage. Their tenderness and their terror are the same thing. They guard a field where nothing changes. They serve a town that never grows. They are the illusion of safety made flesh.

And here is the heavier truth. You do not have to be immortal to live inside the hoarder’s spell. You only have to align your life with denial. You only have to refuse the season. You only have to mistake control for care.

America, now

This polarity exists everywhere. It is older than our maps. Yet I do not think it has ever been brighter, harsher, or more urgent than it is in the United States at this moment.

On one side I see gardeners. They put food in community fridges. They teach children to read even when the books are banned. They plant memorials for the lost and plant saplings for those not yet born. They build co-ops, clinics, classrooms, and choirs. They are mortal and do not hide from that fact. I have seen their hands dirty and their eyes bright.

On the other side I see hoarders. Some of them are billionaires who speak of living longer than kings and act as if they already do. Some of them are oligarchs who dream of a state captured so completely that no election can uproot them. Some of them are politicians who promise winning as a permanent climate. Some of them are followers who will never know private islands or bespoke medicine, yet hoard grievance and ammunition and myth the way their leaders hoard money and attention.

Not every supporter of a strongman believes in immortality with the lips, but the soul can believe what the slogans deny. The pattern is enough. The posture is enough. You can see it in the way everything becomes a possession. Truth. History. Bodies. Books. Territory. The future itself. The hoarder’s creed is simple. If I cannot own it, then no one should have it. If I cannot keep it, then I will break it.

This is not a debate about left and right. This is a divergence of spirit. Mortals and mock immortals. Gardeners and hoarders. Those who accept the season and those who salt the earth.

Havenwood returns

Return to the sisters. The townspeople prospered in a narrow way. The cow stood. The child breathed. The roof did not leak. But no one left for the next valley. No one apprenticed in a craft that did not already exist. No one wrote a book that had not already been told.

This is the hoarder’s trick. It sells safety and calls it freedom. It sells sameness and calls it peace. It sells dependency and calls it community. It flatters your fear of change until you cannot tell the difference between care and captivity.

In that light, the laboratories of immortality and the rallies of strongmen look like two branches of the same tree. They promise a life without endings. They promise a country without winter. What they deliver is a freezer.

And if you want to see that freezer, look around. Once, we were visionary. Once, we reached for the moon. Once, we sent scholars and scientists into the unknown and brought back marvels. Now, those same scholars flee to other shores. Our scientists seek asylum in the safety of other countries that will support them and their work. Our brightest minds are drained, and the industries we once led are leaving us behind. We will progress, yes, but we will not lead. Not like we once did. Our dynamism is traded for the stale comfort of sameness. Our imagination has been bartered for slogans of safety and security. And when the promise wavers, we send our own military into our own streets to “protect” us, as if cages could ever keep us free.

What the gardener knows

Mortality is not our enemy. Mortality is our teacher. It tells us what matters by telling us it will not be here forever. It turns us into people who pass the flame rather than people who try to cage the sun.

This is why the great works of our species were not born from endlessness. The pyramids stand because men with limited breath lifted stone after stone in service to a vision bigger than any one life. Cathedrals were built by hands that would never see the spire finished and yet carved beauty into the lintels. Poems survive because a mortal hand set ink on mortal paper for a mortal reader who would carry living words onward.

The gardener knows what to do in the face of fear. Plant. Teach. Give. Protect. Tend the fragile and the fierce. Mend what can be mended. When it is time to grieve, grieve. When it is time to harvest, share.

The gardener knows what to do with power. Circulate it. Compost it. Turn it back into soil. Keep it moving.

The gardener knows what to do with time. Spend it on what outlives you.

A choice with teeth

I am not naïve about the sweetness of a little more time. We all want it. One more hour with a dying parent. One more season in a house full of laughter. One more year to learn a difficult craft. To desire time is human and good. The question is not whether we would like a few more pages. The question is whether we must bind the book so tight that it can never open again.

The billionaire who dreams of unending life may think he is brave. The strongman who promises unending victory may think he is strong. In truth both are afraid of the same thing. They fear the grief that is the price of love. They fear the surrender that is the price of belonging to a world that does not belong to them.

Havenwood is not real. Its shadow is. The sisters have different faces here. Some wear lab coats. Some wear suits. Some wear flags. All of them whisper that nothing needs to end and that nothing needs to change.

I do not believe them.

I believe in the season. I believe in the teaching power of winter. I believe in the sacrament of endings that seed beginnings. I believe in hands that plant for strangers. I believe in legacy that nourishes, not monuments that suffocate. I believe that mortality turns us into gardeners. I believe that false immortality turns us into hoarders.

So here is the choice, offered without romance and without apology. We can live as mortals who build for others. Or we can live as hoarders who freeze the world and call it safety. We can move with the cycle. Or we can be devoured by the desire to step outside it.

If you listen closely you can hear the hum that the Havenwood story spoke of. It is in the wires and in the headlines and in the halls of power. It is in the lab where a cell is coaxed to forget its age. It is in the chant where a crowd is coaxed to forget its neighbors. It is the tone of stasis, the pitch of fear.

We have another song. It is the one gardeners sing while they work. It has verses for grief and for joy. It remembers. It releases. It returns. It is a mortal song. It is a human song. It is the oldest lullaby and the newest hymn.

May we sing it. May we teach it. May we leave it behind for the ones who come after.