Discerning the political import of complex current events requires great urgency, clarity, and care. Nothing less than the future of our nation is at stake. Wendell Berry's Citizenship Papers , a collection of nineteen essays, is a ringing alarm, a call for resistance and responsibility, and a reminder of how fragile our commonwealth has become at the dawn of the twenty-first century. "We are encouraged to believe that the governments and corporations of the affluent parts of the world are run by people using rational processes to make rational decisions. The dominant faith of the world in our time is rationality. That in an age of reason, the human race, or the most wealthy and powerful parts of it, should be behaving with colossal irrationality ought to make us wonder if reason alone can lead us to do what is right." From "Two Minds".