This story is supposed to be a puff piece, eloquent prose to permanently elevate the people behind the Daejeon Magical Accords to the top shelf of the shrine of history. Transform unruly pines into heroic bonsai form, any deviation from the abstracted ideal carefully clipped away.

And the truth is it did happen more or less as you would have heard, with the Chiyoda Affair, the IAME white paper, and the Night of Ten Thousand Flowers. We changed the lives of billions, an impact so large I can’t comprehend.

But the truth is also that we didn’t know what we were doing. We were selfish, short-sighted, and focused on the wrong things for most of the time. We fell together. We fell apart. 

The truth is that it was a slow-motion tsunami of cascading trainwrecks from beginning to end. 

The first of those, the one that really made the news, was the overdose.