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| Nikiforos Lytras, Antigone in front of the dead Polynices (1865) |
From the Sermon on the Mount:
Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.
But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;
That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.
Your Head Trucker feels old and weary, and not up to writing a lengthy, well-polished post today, so I will just throw out some thoughts and leave it up to you fellas to connect the dots, if they mean anything to you.
It's a gray, drizzly day here in Texas, where last night, several counties away from me, tornadoes destroyed a subdivision, killing or injuring scores of people. Which seems only to be expected somehow, in a week when the news has been brimful of scandal, crime, murder, outrage, and every kind of horrible mayhem. Too much to take in, and far too much to dwell on: it seems the veneer of civilization is worn through in many places, and the ugly, bloody, barbaric core is bleeding out. I suppose awful things have always been happening somewhere, to someone, every day of mankind's existence on this planet; but whereas news used to travel slowly and partially, now it comes roaring at you in living color at all hours of the night and day. Too much to bear. All one can do is look away, and occupy the mind with puttering around the house, and tending one's own narrow garden.
As much as I applaud the recent advances for gay rights and marriage equality that I often feature here in the Blue Truck, I also have to say that I can hardly help despairing for the future of the world, and to be honest, I am glad that whenever it is my time to depart from it, I will leave behind no posterity to worry about. "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity," Yeats wrote a hundred years ago, and it is even truer now than it was then.
At nearly 60 years of age, few illusions about human nature are left to me; with time and experience, one comes to see people for who and what they really are, not what they pretend to be. It is particularly discouraging to see that the great mass of supposedly civilized Western people - the great majority of them at least nominally Christian - are all in a headlong rush to the worst excesses of barbarism. It
feels that way, anyhow. My second-grade teacher got it exactly right one day, fifty years ago, when she asked why a bunch of us little boys were all stepping on one another's shoes in the cafeteria line. "Well, he did it to me, so I did it to the other boy," was the repeated answer to her question. Summing up her inquest with a wry face and a disapproving shake of the head, she exclaimed, "Monkey see, monkey do."
Man is an imitative creature. You become what you think about, what you idolize, what you adore - which may be something quite different from what you say you do. And it seems to me that nearly everyone is doing their damnedest to behave just like characters in a low-class, scrum-bum reality show nowadays. Hence the decline of manners, of civility, of literacy and of reason. Of course, I have to remind myself that the worst examples are not necessarily representative of the whole in any group, but - "Monkey see, monkey do."
Continued after the jump
