Sailing To Oblivium: June 22, 2017

It’s easy to let despondency win these days. Have we reached the “tipping point” in the moral collapse of America? There are signs, sure enough.

- There seems to be no end of corporate money dedicated to ending America as we know it.

- Too many people, many of them otherwise decent human beings, seem totally unable to forgive America for having elected a man of color as president.

- We have a president who, free from evaluation by any traditional measure of moral or ethical standards, suffers no harm from the most egregious words and acts imaginable.
- The heads of federal agencies are, for the most part, headed by individuals dedicated to the destruction of their agency.
- We may have the worst Cabinet in the history of the country, according to some observers.

- We have a horrifying percentage of “one-issue” voters—whether the issue be tax cuts, guns, abortion, or race—who would vote for Charles Manson released from prison and granted the right to run for office, if he promised to support them on their one issue.

- We increasingly place corporate profits over the survival of the planet.

- We are one heart attack away from a Supreme Court that would remove any individual right in favor of corporate wealth.

- We have so-called religious leaders in America who, unlike the Pope in Italy, have joined the forces of hatred and divisiveness, and are leading their followers to the precipice.

- We have dropped a notch from irrelevance to ridicule in the eydes of the eveloped world.

- The United States Senate secretly drafted, with enough votes for a rushed passage in all likelihood, a bill that would affect every person in America. (Stop for a moment and let that one sink in).

- We hear rumors of worse things to come, that the Koch Brothers, for example, are nearing enough political strength at the state level to initiate a constitutional convention at the federal.

So how am I able to retain any level of optimism?

One: This is America. We lived through Jim Crow, the Great Depression, the nightmare of 1968, Nixon, Iran-Contra, and the Great Recession. We can live through this if only we retain our balance.

Two: No matter how high a summer thunderhead rises, it always collapses from its own weight. So may the forces of greed and malice.

And Three: There is something my sainted mother used to tell me. She’d say, “Son, the darkest part of night is just before dawn.”

And Mother was always right.