I’ve never been much of a peddler of hope. It’s not hard to say “everything will be fine” when I have no idea. Certainly, Trump COULD be elected. He certainly has the momentum. Biden is obviously a creepy crook, who may have molested his daughter. But that may not matter. Our media is gone daddy gone. Much of our government is gone daddy gone. The love is gone.
But what I DO believe in is principle and duty. Duty is more important than happiness, because it is the spine of happiness. People who have retained their sanity in this madness have a moral duty to speak THE truth (not their truth: much of this is obvious and really not subject to multiple interpretations, so much as slavish devotion to patent lies on the one side, and confused and bewildered people on the other wondering what the hell is happening).
Speakers of the truth are keepers of a flame of sorts. They are, in Orwell’s writing, the revolutionaries, the TRUE revolutionaries, in world’s given over to envenomed and rabid sheep.
When you can do nothing else, speak the truth, as you see it, after having taken the time, and processed the pain of difference–where it exists–of actually looking with your own eyes.
I can’t know the future any more than you can, other than by predicting my own behavior, which will not vary until compelled to by force. The madness is not universal, even if it is widespread. The craziness is not insuperable. Even now, I think, many people are waking, blinking their eyes, and wondering how the knives got in their hands, without being able to recall just what Trump and his supporters did to merit their rage.
I suppose I could put it this way: believing sincerely in absolute principles is one way of predicting your own future, because you are creating in advance, not the concrete circumstances of it, but your reaction to it.
It is hard, very hard, to see how we escape this period of induced psychosis. So much time, so much effort, so much MONEY has gone into its creation. The Left has developed a talent for making suckers out of genuinely good people, and then slowly turning them into reflexive drones, by changing the behavior, while altering none of the words.
We may lose our freedom. Our prosperity may be destroyed–pointlessly, needlessly.
But we need to bear up anyway. We need to face the wind of the future as well as we can, no doubt in most of our cases imperfectly, with fear in our hearts, with doubt and confusion, anger and terror, but face it nonetheless, with as much dignity and humanity as we can. This, in this time, is authentic spirituality, in my view. We can and should do so much better, but it is a start. I will never trust any “spiritual teacher” unable to see and speak the obvious, and right now that is most of them.