The Western mind has developed an inability to choose preservation. It has voluntarily elected suicide believing that sacrificing oneself and his society for others most unlike his own will reap rewards of equity and justice for all. The friends of our enemy are those fellow citizens of the free world propagandizing at every turn, on every platform, that this civilization is anything but civil; it is a bug that must be exterminated, a pestilence expunged, an infection cured and medicated. Until the civilization’s harbingers, defenders, allies, oppressors, colonizers, imperialists, et al. are subdued, if not entirely neutralized, the world will not know peace.
We will not always have Paris. That hallmark of the West is gone too.
Our lives are precariously dangling on a thread that it is easy to feel has long been cut and discarded, finding ourselves not only struggling to make our way back up but struggling to find from where that thread came. Where is home? We’re entrenched in an oceanic chasm; it’s dark, lonely, and our most almighty, affluent, and authoritative “leaders” are hardly anything of the sort. “Here are the problems,” they observe, as our anger appears to become the illusory semblance of a solution, and we become contented that nothing else is offered.
“Here am I,” you and I say, but who are we to elicit attention? No one has elected us to any such position; and even those that are heard are hardly, if at all, elected.
Yet we are carried away by sturm und drang, by others’ emotions, that we crystallize them as our own, becoming parrots of their beliefs so that we are lost in wars that do not belong to us, all the while ignoring the war that has been wrenching at our steps, blustering in dense silence as it unsuspectingly incises our hearts and homes.
That “sleeping giant” that is America has woken long ago but has since turned against us and we are whimpering under its boot—under our boot because, looking close, that face belongs to each one of us. This monster that no longer ignites fear in our enemies is more than a projection, it is a manifestation of our failures as a people (lack of a people). It is our suicide.
The tumor of civilization has spread and compounded so that it engulfs even the healthy bits. Severance is not an option, the overgrowths are social organisms impregnating the impressionable, exploitable weaknesses in our constitution. But the possibilities for a tumor are also genetic, and sowed in civilization is the germ of hell.
And maybe this appears to be the way out. It is dark and lonely in this chasm and our neighbors are filled with a hatred toward anyone that speaks of climbing out. “We must dig deeper,” they say, believing that there is light in Earth’s core. “But that is hell,” we say, and the ensuing clamor plunges us further anyway into depravity and barbarity.
“But this is love,” they say—and like guards to our collective, prison, they have swallowed the keys. But we are not barbarians so we do not cleave their stomachs. Because “even totalitarians see the errors of their ways, right?”
Soon enough we’ll pass with no more than an indistinct imagination borrowed from our fathers of what this could have been, and certainly what it used to be. And for what, for whom?
"They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed, and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant, and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless."
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Frightful words and frightful times are these. Rather than think of the 14th Century, I am reminded of the stories my grandmother told me of the Depression and Dust Bowl. And the Guthrie song:
We talked of the end of the world, and then
We'd sing a song an' then sing it again.
We'd sit for an hour an' not say a word,
And then these words would be heard:
So long, it's been good to know yuh;
So long, it's been good to know yuh;
So long, it's been good to know yuh.
This dusty old dust is a-gettin' my home,
And I got to be driftin' along.
But it was not the end of the world, of course. These people had faith, fortitude and courage they didn't know they had.