In order to preserve his way of life Odysseus threaded the necks of twenty faithless servant girls and hung them in his courtyard above the slick blood of their newly slain lovers. His wife was true but his dog was gone and that was already too much.

Charged to preserve his race Aeneas trod heavily over the Aegean. “I will not let this change who I am.” But it did. The passive lover turned bloodthirsty killer as soon as he set foot on the right plot of land. With age and experience he had learned the essential: when time is running out it’s best to ignore your conscience.

It is easy to leave scorched earth in your wake if you don’t look back. There must be no change or loss. And therefore preemptive death to all who might destroy us. It’s a mistake, for we know that those who cheat fate will meet their fathers at the crossroads and walk away with blood-stained hands, mad for power, cursing God and blaming the crime on some petty criminal’s sad bid for survival.

So loss will come and we will die from one generation to the next. Landscapes won’t be recognized and humans will adapt, because that’s what they’re born to do. The world is no longer a chess board, surprise attacks are few. All can see the long view: those who would preserve us will instead destroy us.

Or die awaiting trial. Footnoted statesmen, who answer fear with fear, whose solution is destruction of the people, who, no longer adequately armed, become internal spies, gathering evidence and rhetoric, hoping against hope for an appeal to a locality or figure on whom to pin the burden of responsibility.

For mere riches constant vigilance is too high a cost. It turns men into dogs. Odysseus left his gate unmanned for twenty years. How right or righteous he must have been to so easily reclaim his kingdom: a few justified murders and all sleep tight. While Aeneas, according to Geoffrey, began the British Empire–which in turn begat this kind of just war, faithless and fierce through the flesh of others, providing a meaning to bring to a future in which we will not be.