First Things

First off -- I'm not a lunatic. I am just a former Army officer concerned by certain trends he is seeing in the broader society.

Brad Hamilton is not my real name, though people of my age will recognize the reference. I'm a guy who is working a series of bad jobs on his way to eventual retirement, hoping that at some point he gets to throw a pot of coffee on a guy robbing a convenience store and achieve his 15 minutes of fame. Again, you'll get the joke if you're my age. I once served in a National Guard unit where one of my NCOs told me, "The dream of every National Guardsman is that someday, he gets to shoot a looter."

That's a joke, of course. Though I'm not sure he meant it as one.

I look at society and I see the words of William Butler Yeats being played out in front of my eyes.

THE SECOND COMING

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?


I don't know. But whatever it is, I plan to survive it.