The Refusal to Heal
When a burning knife is the only way

ELIZABETH GEORGE
Mar 2, 2026

We do a chaotic dance in the United States, to the accompaniment of drum beats and the ritual chant of “U.S.A! U.S.A!” Sometimes we add music to it, music that asks for on-your-feet attention, hands on heart, and the removal of headwear. Like all dances, however, when the music stops and the dancing is finished, we look at one another briefly, perhaps giving an acknowledging smile and nod, and we leave the floor. This has been the pattern of life in the United States since I first became aware enough to begin asking the question “Why?”

In my childhood, most of my why’s had to do with actions I didn’t understand. My parents were great consumers of the nightly news, which generally accompanied our dinner, so I was exposed as a young child to what was going on around me. I’ve become aware that among some young parents in the current era, there exists a desire to protect children from seeing what is going on in the country, perhaps allowing them an idyllic childhood free from witnessing incidents around them that might result in a knowledge of circumstances that they might find distressing.

My parents didn’t bother with that, so early on I saw fire hoses loose powerful blasts at Black protesters in the South; I saw German shepherd police dogs on leashes, snapping and snarling and leaping at these same people; I saw orange-garbed Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire in protest of their government in Vietnam; I saw what occurred during Mario Savio’s free speech movement at UC Berkeley; I witnessed every televised moment in the aftermath of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, including seeing Lee Harvey Oswald murdered on live TV. So mine was not a childhood protected from the reality of what was going on around me during the very moments it was going on.

School, however, was different. Like almost all children who went to school during the ‘50s and ‘60s, I was never made aware of the less salubrious parts of American history such as what Manifest Destiny actually meant, such as the Trail of Tears, such as the buying and selling and rape and torture and murder of people held in slavery for 300 years, such as the removal of native people from their tribal lands onto reservations where they lived in poverty, such the forced imprisonment of the Japanese and the resulting loss of their goods and property. The list could go on. But creating an endless list isn’t my objective with this essay. My objective rises from some dialogue that struck me when I was completing my reading of The Poppy War trilogy:

“You don’t fix hurts by pretending they never happened. You treat them like infected wounds. You dig deep with a burning knife and gouge out the rotten flesh and then, maybe, you have a chance to heal.”

We are where we are today because the United States has long been engaging in pretence. In order to portray itself as the greatest, the best, the richest, the most merciful, the most innovative and best educated country in the world, it has had to pretend that many incidents in its history simply did not happen. It does this by not acknowledging them. And while the United States has done many admirable things prior to the 2020s, what it has not done and still refuses to do is to look at its infected wounds. Instead, the government of the country has either turned a blind eye to its infected wounds or has used language to disguise them altogether.

We are seeing daily how this is playing out, and we are seeing daily the consequences. Donald Trump, his cabinet, his appointees, and his family are our infected wounds. Five of the nine justices of the Supreme Court of the United States comprise one of our infected wounds. The Republican Congress—with very, very few exceptions—comprise a huge, infected wound. Yet no one has picked up a burning knife to gouge out the rotten flesh of who and what they are and what they have done. Instead the infection has been allowed to fester and to grow, spreading into newspapers, into televised news, and onto the internet.
We can certainly put bandages or gauze over the infected wounds. That is, after all, what we’ve been doing for 300 years. But because we’ve been doing exactly that, the infection has been contained at times, but it has not healed. And the country itself has never had a chance to change its perspective and to alter its course.

What has prevented us from doing that is one simple fact: We haven’t had to. Instead, we’ve spent millions of hours and trillions of dollars bulking up our military. We’ve created slogans like “My country, right or wrong” to excuse our sins and “Make America Great Again”, with its suggestion that the only way forward is to return to a past where nothing the country did could ever be wrong and nothing the country did was ever subject to scrutiny, accounting, or apology. And that brings us to the present moment of a new war abroad and fascism at home about which I would like to say: As long as government after government in the United States continues to stand astride the world like a demented Colossus, we will fester in the swamp of lies, greed, and corruption that has become our daily bread.

I have no suggestion to make about gouging out the infection in our country. It’s my belief that it cannot be done at all unless and until the people of the country make it happen. Yet more and more it appears to me that the people of the country do not have the appetite for a prolonged confrontation. It’s as if “do it to Julia” has taken the place of “not in my country, not in my state, not in my city, not in my neighborhood, and definitely not in my name.”

You are exhausted, and I get it. You want to hide in a hole, and I get that as well. I’m thoroughly exhausted in this eleventh year of having Donald Trump in my life, and I want to crawl into a cave and seal it up behind me. One of my greatest sadnesses comes from the knowledge that the country will probably not save itself during my lifetime, it will not stand up to the power-hungry and greed-filled fascists who flood the zone with bile every day, and it will not produce a leader willing to heat the knife and gouge out the rotten flesh of the past, in order to set a course toward what the United States could be. Note that I don’t say “What the United States used to be” because the Founding Fathers also could not face the past and heal the wounds they themselves had caused by not abolishing slavery. After all, a good number of them were slaveholders, which in and of itself is yet another festering wound from the past that has not been dealt with openly.
Our collective tragedy is born of the fact that we are not a great country, and we never were a great country.

Our only hope is that we could be, if we have the will to become instruments of admission, reparation, apology, and change.

© 2026 Elizabeth George
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104