"Golden Days Before They End"

Learning and accepting, these are the chief accomplishments of this journey.  Obedience too: this is a quality we are often unaware that we possess.  We practice it nearly every moment of our existences.  The laws of gravity, the seemingly unceasing beating of our hearts, breathing in and out, holding our peace for most slights, defects of circumstance, tools, objects, those around us and inadequacies of every imaginable variety: all these we usually refrain from not accepting and instead obey the silent admonition that reminds us to bear reality, while our sensitivities may often cry out for revolution.  It would be far too exhausting to express objections to every pinprick of the omnipresent malaise of imperfection.  Maturity helps this process along and the more creative among us can focus on little niches that we endeavor to make our own personal fiefdoms of mastery, whether it's a job well done, a room thoroughly cleaned, a car repaired, a poem, painting or even a business report or budget plan crafted to a level of excellence that deeply satisfies with its gleaming artistry or mathematical precision rendered after great labor.

But learning and accepting limitations, these may be among the greatest treasures of a man or woman's secret trove.  I do not allude to a thinly veiled surrender or a fearfulness and a moral cowardice masquerading as philosophy.  No, these absorbed lessons prepare us to love more deeply, to permit us to help others as we see and understand needs that we simply could not see or that had only irritated our younger, more impatient selves. These "golden days before they end" have that quality of beautiful brilliance, though they are not the halcyon days of our departed callowness.  Yes, they're of that orangey-yellow that is the only slightly younger brother of a sibling known as sunset.  To continue Orbison's memorable lyrics, these special days "whisper their secrets to the wind."  He was speaking of the pain of rejection and abandonment.  Yet both of these are in essence, about the abhorrence of change, another word for death. And death is not unwilling to share its story and "coming events cast their shadows" as the aphorism instructs and as Orbison's whispering days attest.   There is something unfathomable to a degree and yet unmistakably intuited as true, and therefore not frightening, about these golden rays that start to lengthen the streaks of the waning days' pinkish-blue skies.  They are merciful and ever so sweet as they prepare us for not just a metamorphosis, but the promise of a transfiguration, one that, if the source of its majesty and power could be fully comprehended in our present state as mortals, would overwhelm and pulverize our intellects like an unknown force that could melt diamonds.

Something Greater Than Ourselves

There is nothing new about narcissism.  Neither is self-sacrifice a novelty.  One may quibble about which one's claim to seniority is the worthier.  What is more important, it seems, can the quality of future heroic deeds be potentially enriched, especially if the ranks of heroes themselves can only realistically be expected to continue to be decimated by murderous narcissists or converts to their cause?

Let's state the problem.  Rather, let's list the maladies, i.e. just the most cancerous ones and then let's see how many of our guys are available to throw their bodies on the enemies' grenades and to toss as many as possible back at the "untermenschen".  This calls to mind the German proverb that translates reliably as "The fish rots from the head down." The current administration, its re-election inexplicable in normal historical/economic terms, certainly spearheads the selfishness, laziness and winks at flirtations with moral turpitude. But the body politic did speak, if not clearly and loudly, then with minimal ambivalence and a decided unwillingness to admit a mistake about a charming man.  Never underestimate the quality of personal likability; the devil's power to assume a pleasing shape is no doubt also part of the equation.  But enough about my animus towards the Pied Piper of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

First off: corruption, narcissism's close cousin, is rampant in the land and no region or political party is free from it nor are the proverbial grassroots uninvolved with its slimy spread.  Spiritual pollution has always luxuriated in our economic world of bounty and opportunity (plus manipulation) that has characterized much of American enterprises since at least the Gilded Age, though such conduct flourished during the Civil War and most probably even earlier.  What has changed in the last half century however, is the steady advance of a kind of swaggering sophistication and self-reliance (assuredly not the pioneers' "rugged individualism" variety) that belittles traditional cultural and religious values and has been able to literally broadcast these messages, that soon began to be understood as really one message, that of a kind of psychic self-sufficiency that gravitated toward a pleasure principal that confused the American Dream's rainbow's end with a scramble for satiety that became gluttonous in its habits.  Nothing wrong with hard work or the goal of sweet idleness after such sustained labors: call it "the mint julep and the hammock dream" realized.  But this kind of selfishness never drifted into the kind of narcissism we see today.  Self-interest has always traditionally been tempered in this country by the understanding that others have needs and aspirations and that  a solicitous inclination toward our neighbors is not just a societal lubricative, but one guided by many moral dicta of our religious and cultural heritage which is Western, Judeo-Christian and humanist in character.

When receptionists at abortion clinics offhandedly tell patients that any complications, followed by copious bleeding and then a momentous discharge needs to be simply "flushed", when news reports include daily stories of indicted or arrested politicians, school faculty or administrators, clergymen, etc., when sex scandals from all strata of society are routinely part of the news digest and shame is no longer comprehended even as an abstract entity by many of our youth as well as the not so young, then a grave state of affairs exists and menaces all that we hold, or once held dear.  When fame, with the unmistakable stench of notoriety its chief characteristic, and glaringly ostentatious wealth are preferred to quiet self-respect and modesty in dress, comportment and consumption, when cynicism and vituperative glibness march forth in lockstep masquerading as comedy and when manipulations of whole populations with the new sciences of mass data management grow in scope and sophistication, perhaps exponentially, then we are on the cusp of witnessing the diabolical birth of a monstrous world nearly fully formed and ready to dwarf the evil of the despicable totalitarian "isms" that began to germinate quickly with such ghastly consequences in the second quarter of the twentieth century.

What shall be the "something greater than ourselves" in our future?  Will it continue to (or once again) be the Supreme Being whose love is so all encompassing and the only author of true gift giving?  Or will there be new masters of our world?  Elites who only think that they are godly: men who lust for greater and greater domination of their fellow man in the same tired, deadly fashion that men (long before the technological/ideological marriages made in hell of the last nearly century) have always maniacally pursued their hunger for conquest: will these new itching graspers be the lords to whom we shall grovel and mindlessly submit with mirthless grins on our glazed over visages? Will lobotomized minds, if not literally our brains, be our destiny as we submit because we have clasped to our rotting breasts the seductive comfort of paternalism and the trough of an illusory free lunch offered by these "leaders" that imaginarily brings security but that is a "nutrition" that in fact, will feed on us, one liberty crushing morsel after another until we are starved to death?

Again, heroes to combat the nearly imminent enslavement: where are they?  Roughly half of the American electorate knows that there is something profoundly wrong.  This group however, is hardly a monolithic community of defenders of America's traditional values.  Self-interest, of the enlightened variety, normally a neutral entity with an inclination toward the positive in times when liberty is healthy, cannot be relied upon today to halt the vermin of the so-called Progressive movement and their perverse allies.  That is, differences among libertarians, neo-conservatives, conservatives, evangelicals, traditional Catholics, religious Jews, even courageous Muslims (those able to overcome their defensiveness), etc., must be subordinated to again, "something greater than ourselves." We can no longer afford to bicker: the risk of our differences exploding into internecine blood letting, even if only metaphorically, is too great and too wasteful of precious time and energy. The apathetic must be educated and energized; forget, contrastingly, the Obama cultists as they are too far gone to reason with and mercifully are still a tiny minority. THEY are the true "1%", similar to the facts of the Bolshevists' actual numerical might. But that particular history must be treated as a cautionary tale. Lying, lying, lying: whether proclaiming with puffery about one's "majority" (Bolshevik) status or disseminating innumerable bits of misinformation, the blackhearted but hardworking anti-Americans of the dangerous new Democrat party must never be taken lightly or underestimated. Keep working for our greater cause: it's the cause of freedom, not of license. It's the cause of true service to God, country and the traditional family. It will be an increasingly desperate struggle as the scum of the Hard Left have advanced, but not nearly as far as they imaginarily suppose.  With the love and aid of a power greater than ourselves, we will win.