If you have seen the original Planet of the Apes (the one starring Charleton Heston), you may remember its intriguing and, from some standpoints, tragic ending.  As Heston treks into the hinterlands beyond the confines of the apes' city, he chances upon what appears to be a massive pile of various and assorted materials, seemingly without any point.  As he looks closer, however, he sees something which sends a chill down his spine.  There, nearly concealed in the debris, its tip faintly rising into the fetid air, is the Statue of Liberty, that famous icon of the American dream, now buried in the detrius of a remote moonscape of a land.
     What happened?  Perhaps the most sinister of the apes (Dr. Zaius) was right in his assessment of the human race.  Humanity had indeed destroyed itself, a victim, the movie wants us to think, of its pride and hubris, caught up, fatally, in a wave of empty and meaningless ambition and greed whose shortcomings it failed to see until it was too late.
     "How lonely sits the city," the prophet Jeremiah writes in the opening chapter of the Book of Lamentations in the Hebrew Bible, "that was full of people!  She has become like a widow who was once great among the nations."  As the entire world knows, America just had a presidential election.  It capped a bitter and divisive campaign, one that tore the country apart, ideologically, religiously, and otherwise.  Unfortunately, those tears may never heal.  The nation is terribly divided and asunder, likely for many years to come.  America may become a very lonely country.
     Let us hope not.  Let us hope that, before God (or as theologians like to put, coram Deo) and each other, the American people can rise toward unity, to forswear sectarian mongering and vitriol and remember the image of the Statue of Liberty beckoning from the New York shores, remember that, for the good of the country, and the world, comity and wholeness and community are more important, and certainly longer lasting, than hegemony and always insisting on being right.
     May America (and the world as well) not slip into the lonely hinterlands of myopic imagination and ideological folly.
     How lonely sits the city.