We have options, for now

The next holiday is in less than two weeks. About a month later comes Valentine's Day, which this year coincides with Ash Wednesday. Spring Equinox follows on March 19 and Easter comes early, at the end of March, the day before April Fool’s Day. No, I’m not wishing my life away but I am looking forward to getting through winter and maybe having a chance at occasional sunny days, you know, more than one in a row. Plus, I’m tired of reading pundits prognosticating what’s going to happen, and why or why not, between now and a year from now.

the dawn of a new era, or error?

Photo by J. Harrington

Do you remember the story of Belling the Cat? We seem to have entered a time in which that fable fits more and more of our contemporary environmental and political issues. These days we frequently refer to it as kicking the can down the road. More and more, we’re asked or told that next November could become the end of democracy as we know it. Being curmudgeonly, that prompts me to ask “Is democracy as we know it worth saving?” A better way to phrase that question might be to ask “What would make it worthwhile to save democracy and can we get it?”

There are substantial groups disenchanted with government, not matter who’s in charge. Compromise and civility seem to be forgotten. “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing!” Hyper-individualism has replaced community and comity. Since I seem to be on a roll with quotations today, remember “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” Now, let’s ask ourselves if the shoe fits.

It seems to me there are two crucial factors that we need to rebuild unless we wish to become a suburb of Russia, China, Iran or the UAE: first truth and how to confirm it; second, trust and how to exercise it. otherwise, we may as well just sit back and await a Second Coming.

The Second Coming

By William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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