When the Yale historian and bestselling author Timothy Snyder was 14, his parents took him to Costa Rica, a country lauded for its conservation of natural resources that is rated freer and happier than the United States. He recalls feeling liberated and unfettered as he hiked in cloud forests with his brothers, seeing monkeys, sloths and spectacular birds. One day, a local friend led the boys on a mysterious quest to view something special; after walking for three hours through a maze of paths, they arrived at a cascade hiding a cave, where they could gaze out at the green world through curtains of falling water.
Trump’s ‘big lie’ over his 2020 election defeat is compared with both communist and fascist traditions
Snyder uses this anecdote to argue that he was liberated by the paths created by others through the forest and that ‘we all need a right of way’, which is reliant on the trails blazed by others.
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