Like many other people I’m beginning to feel more than a little gloomy about the prospects for the next two years. I’m talking about secular prospects, of course. Two years ago, although I didn’t vote for the present Administration, and although I disagree with its social policies, I was willing to be patient. I’m not an ideologue, and I’m not even particularly political. But I don’t feel as patient as I did two years ago.
Apparently, we’re headed for political deadlock. Too many people are out of work, or not working enough to sustain themselves and their families. Deficits are at an unprecedented level and will have to be worked off not in decades, but by generations. There are of course other issues, but this is not the place for a secular litany.
What distresses me most, though, is the feeling that we have, as a society, been morally battered. The aspirations of one segment of society are the abominations of another. It’s not that I subscribe only in a philosophical way to certain moral standards. I feel them in my bones as the natural and fitting way human life ought to be lived, and I have an ominous sense that not living that way will summon metaphorical demons.
I try to express this in a poem which I read on one of my podcast sites. It’s called: An Evil in Our Commonweal. You can hear it here:
On a walk yesterday, my eyes were drawn upward to a broad wing-spanned scavanger wheeling downward through pine trees: a vulture.
It lighted on the street in front of me, twenty yards ahead, in this polite, progressive, politically active northern Virginia community, eyeing the road kill: a newly mowed down squirrel.
It made me mad. I walked toward the scene making sounds and stomping. But it didn’t move, barely noting my presence. I finally waved my arms – the only thing close to its wing span. And it flew off, for the moment.
Your site is a discovery. Thanks. And your poem articulates that “ominous sense” (which I share).
There is a morality which we “feel in [our] bones”.
What is frightening to me is the zeal with which those who do not feel that morality oppose it. They are not merely indifferent. And they are no longer a minority.