Eclectic Amateur

Twelve years ago, I was watching the live television feed from NYC from the burning North Tower of the World Trade Center. At the time, as far as I knew, this might still have been a horrible accident.

Then, I saw a second airliner enter the picture and bank in order to hit the South Tower.  And I knew:

That was no accident.  An enemy is doing this.  We are at war.

That was Realization #1.  Unfortunately, it was followed almost immediately by Realization #2:

Somebody is going to get bombed. I hope it’s the actual perpetrators.

I am sometimes told that I am cynical. Well, there you have it. The Twin Towers hadn’t fallen yet, and my second reaction is to wonder what bloody wars of Empire we would get dragged in to by our “leaders” in Washington who no doubt were salivating already over having a slam-dunk reason to pursue every crazy military action and nation-building scheme they’d already dreamed up.

Twelve years have not given me any reason to be more confident.

Do I despair? Of our political class, yes. “Put not your trust in princes.” Of life? Hardly. I fully expect hard times ahead as the consequences of national folly unfold. That only means there’s a lot of work to do.  It will be “interesting times” and no one should have an excuse to be bored.

I just need to remember in the middle of it all that “Living well is the best revenge.”

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: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind 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