The Language of Rebuilding

And also of breaking

English offers a rich vocabulary for describing things coming apart—each word echoing the slow, inevitable slide toward entropy that defines the physics of our universe. With so many verbs to choose from, we instinctively pair them with certain nouns, shaped by repetition, memory, and habit.

Fabric frays.
Concrete cracks.
Earth erodes.

How lovely that these pairings are often alliterative.

Wood warps.
Stone splits.
Metal melts.

Glass shatters has its own singular satisfaction—the sibilant sound at the end of the first word blending beautifully into the beginning of the next. A bridge over a divide.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about fissures and fractures, rendings and ruptures. Everywhere I look, I’m aware of how broken things feel—how sharp-edged and disjointed the world has become.

The list of what’s being divided, dismantled, and devastated feels endless: our democratic norms, environmental protections, the social safety net, our reckoning with history, women’s autonomy over their own bodies. A growing ledger of essential rights and vital institutions that are being chipped away at. 

When I hear of lives disrupted by unlawful detentions and forced disappearances, I picture the cries of children in families torn apart.

When I read about the melting ice sheets and all they portend, I imagine the thunderous crack of calving cliffs.

And when I watch the rapid unraveling of scientific research, strands of knowledge no longer connected, I know how much life-saving progress is slipping away. 

This regime is intent on destruction. It would be one thing if there were purpose—like the razing of an old building to make way for something better. But the only blueprint they follow is for how quickly they can tear down the foundations of our shared future, how recklessly they can sever our bonds with one another and with the world. The only seeds they sow are those that bear the bitter fruit of corruption, autocracy, and fear.

It’s like a toddler strutting through a tower of blocks, gleeful in the act of toppling. But where a toddler’s joy is often infectious, the smug hubris of these marauders is toxic.

Life already holds enough tattered chapters—pain, suffering, illness, and loss come with being human. None of that stops, even as we are forced to contend with more.

And yet, we also live in a world that doesn’t always break. Human ingenuity has built bridges skyward, sent airplanes aloft, coaxed abundance from the soil. We know how to design systems and structures strong enough to endure—even in the face of tremendous force. We’ve done this since the beginning of time. 

Today, we don’t know how much this regime can lay to waste before the pendulum shifts, hopefully soon. But thankfully, we have a wonderful list of verbs for the act of generation, and regeneration, when the time comes. 

If we want particular inspiration, we could do a lot worse than this:  

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The famous opening words of our Constitution speak to us across the centuries, propelled by this set of verbs: form, establish, insure, provide, promote, secure, ordain—and establish once more. It’s a remarkable list, and a reminder that democracy is an act of constant construction. 

If this regime gets its way, they’ll dismantle everything that document set in motion. But I prefer to imagine those powerful words—and the ideals behind them—guiding us when, inevitably, we begin to rebuild.

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