Yashima Gakutei
Prosperity: Ding Gu (Roku, Teiko),
from an untitled series of happiness, prosperity, and longevity
(c. 1824)

"This will be the work by which future generations will judge patriots."

With fewer than ten installments of this Prosperity series remaining, I start foreshadowing the ending here. I must have explained the process by which I intended to consider Prosperity in this series, a method I might label Dialogic. Rather than start with the ending in mind, I began with questions, honestly intending to inquire, then inquire again, following the story however it seemed to unfold. This tactic might explain the winding pathway this series must have seemed to have been taking. I began each writing session a little bit baffled about where the unfolding story might lead me next, for in this type of analysis, the subject guides the writer rather than the writer crafting the plot. The plot emerges, and the writer trusts that it must. This writer chose, day to day, so only in that way did I influence the resulting flow. The storyline has emerged from the process rather than the process or the author guiding it, so I have not employed foreboding until now, and not only because I couldn’t have known enough about where the Dialogic method would lead me, but also because foreboding couldn’t have served any possible purpose if my purpose was genuine discovery. But we both know an end seems near now, and we both wonder where this expose might be going.

It has been demonstrating its Legacy with every installment. Prosperity can’t be unique in that it writes its Legacy in every instant. It was never just discovering forward, but laying its Legacy backward with every story. Did I experience this excursion as pleasant? Yes, I did, even though many of the stories described something other than beds of roses. One of Prosperity’s more curious properties must be that it serves as a stark contrast to its opposition. Those proclaiming that they were out to Make America Great Again were paving their Legacy right alongside the Prosperity they treated with such hostility. The contrast has been more than merely stark; it has been genuinely frightening. It may be that once we experience Prosperity, our judgment is forever altered. We can no longer comfortably swallow the same bullshit that previously might have seemed to have been so appealingly packaged. Even blind people can clearly perceive the downgrade when trading a reliable cow for a pocket half-filled with promises presumed to be “magic” beans. Prosperity naturally distrusts anyone promising to recreate any past. Prosperity trusts forward.

I foresee troubling times for our humbled and currently belittled Prosperity. Those “magic” beans would remain worthless even if that pocketful somehow became a hill. They amount to nothing more than an imaginary asset, one purchased with hollow promissory notes destined to come due. These will need to be repaid as at least reparations for the many sins committed in the slandered name of that backward greatness. Those whom the administration—our government— illegally arrested and extra-judicially incarcerated, humiliated, and deported, will need to be repatriated before we will be able to hold our heads up high and enjoy any semblance of Prosperity again. The judgments awarded will rightly cost us and our government trillions, easily overshadowing whatever billions illegal tariffs never quite managed to rake in, especially when combined with tax cuts and under-the-table deals to administration cronies. The corruption will have to be permanently corrected. People will have to end up in jail. Our Constitution will most certainly have to be corrected. The treasury will most probably have to resort to some futuristic financial wizardry, not limited to some form of progressive taxation, to consummate this effort, which will and should dwarf anything contemplated by the Marshall Plan. We will be purchasing not just Prosperity, but our lost decency again.

This effort will require real patriots. Not those idiots who cosplay cartoon generals, but regular citizens who decide to forego some of their Prosperity to invest in a truly worthy Legacy. We will all be challenged to become investors not in some high-blown mortgage scam worthy only of our idiot incumbent-in-chief and his cronies, but in something within which we might rediscover our pride. These reparations might eventually help to convince our friends and former trading partners that we might once again be worthy of trust and partnership, as we mostly were back when our economy was still the envy of the world under our last decent President, Biden. We will have to reinvent ourselves, leaving behind and utterly abandoning the poisonous Legacy left by Reagan and his ilk, and become more like what our forebears insisted they originally intended, if not achieved. Expect this strategy to infuriate those who attempted the swindle, those who claimed to hold religious convictions rather than bigotries they struggled for the questionable freedom to express. Expect even those to eventually embrace a wokeness that will make what they once protested against seem like lilac water in comparison. They will relearn, as they never had before, what it means to be tolerant toward fellow citizens and, perhaps, themselves.

We could become that once-mythical shining city on a hill, but we’ll have to volunteer to climb that freaking hill. It will certainly be steeper and taller than any of those who volunteer to climb it could have ever imagined, and each day along the way should properly serve as an onerous dedication test. Just how much will we want to regain our shattered self-esteem? How badly do we really want to be able to think of ourselves as a decent people again? How critical will it seem to each of us that, if not us, but perhaps our grandchildren’s grandchildren are able to experience something similar to the Prosperity we once so cheaply sold for the promise of some subprime mortgaged beans? We could be remembered as even greater than The Greatest Generation, if we can only attend to the Legacy we’re laying down as we live our proudly modest lives. Our incumbent knew how to mortgage. He was, after all, merely a real estate tycoon. He managed to mortgage every single citizen’s Legacy for potentially generations into the future, which, as a result, might not end up being a future we will get to spend together. We’ll have to choose to hold together, too.

If we aspire to possess once again an economy that fully qualifies as the envy of the world, we’ll need to grow up. We will need to leave behind us the billionaires’ juvenile aspirations and aspire to something considerably more human. We must insist on something better than just the best. We’ll need to reignite the passion our forebears found for plenty of good enough. Humility might need to precede any regained sense of Prosperity. We are very likely to experience privation before we ever manage to achieve what anyone might recognize as salvation, and whatever salvation eventually comes might not appear precisely as anticipated or advertised. But we must believe that our identity, our soul, if you will, might be worth the effort, that Prosperity must surely be its own reward, and that we owe the world as well as ourselves more contrition and reparation than we might care to admit, even to ourselves. This will be the work by which future generations will judge patriots.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Prosperity, #PureSchmaltz