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?

W. B. Yeats, 1919

This is 2020 for me; the year the precipice arrived. With a confluence of destabilizing masses exerting unprecedented forces against already failing systems, it just all broke. Extremism has grown exponentially and, with fewer people in the middle ground to stabilize that tug of left and right, our orbital trajectory seems on course to tear itself apart.

It's sad that this poem is allegorical of the atmosphere of post-first of its kind-World War Europe and yet seems so fitting a century later; spiteful cycles of self-harm just don't seem like a long-term stable strategy to me!

I cannot believe that you've had no responses to your post, until mine, which is probably unwanted.

Welcome to this 'new world' of people who have their heads so far shoved up their own arses that they cannot hear you.

What you say is true, nevertheless. Best wishes.

Not applicable to me. My alias provides a hint as to why, but if that's not clear enough, there's this:

It was written during the last major pandemic, just years before the "Roaring 20's". Just saying.

jamest wrote:I cannot believe that you've had no responses to your post, until mine, which is probably unwanted.

Welcome to this 'new world' of people who have their heads so far shoved up their own arses that they cannot hear you.

What you say is true, nevertheless. Best wishes.

Working from the arena of hyperbole again when responding to the personal and particular?

Shocker.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

OlivierK wrote:It was written during the last major pandemic, just years before the "Roaring 20's". Just saying.

Right... and then the Great Depression, but I do hear what you're saying. I should clarify that I didn't mean to imply anything like 'we're dooooomed, doomed I tellz ya!' - I meant rather that it's disappointing how badly we're rising to the challenges of our time, and more so because the grand external imperative challenges are mostly being occluded by our silly little psychological holdovers. If we weren't swamping our planet in rubbish, stripping the world bare for resources, and dramatically changing the chemical composition of our atmosphere... then fine, everyone could contentedly settle into running their ape out-group hate dramas! In a way, it would be almost pleasant to only have to worry about how stupid we are to one another.

Oh, sure. There's plenty to be disheartened by.

I try not to let my innate optimism cloud my judgement, but I also try to keep as realistic a sense of perspective when things are going to shit as possible. Much of what made 2020 so particularly shit will pass. As for our collective bungling of managing our planet's resources, I'm hoping that the next generation will do a better job. In general, they seem likely to. Better by enough? Probably not.