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?
(Yeats, "The Second Coming")
I know he wrote this poem a long time ago, but it is so prescient, and I feel like the older I get, and the older the world gets,the more true it becomes.
I'm not sure whether this is totally true, but at my college back home my creative writing professor told us that although Yeats was not Christian, he thought time was a spiral that narrowed into the birth of Christ and has been slackening and growing since then. It really seems like every year we all become more disordered, morality, everything.
I think I have a distorted perception of this because I am only nineteen. To me, it seems things in the world have grown drastically worse, but really that is probably because I was mostly oblivious to such things until at least high school, and since then as I have started reading more and watching the news more and talking more about the world and politics and everything, of course everything has seemed to be following apart, really, since I just been gaining aware of the existent awareness that might have always existed.
That aside, though, I really do think the world is falling apart. This is partially a religious belief (a la "Revelation") but it is also just a simple revelation. So thinking about that, thinking about things loosening and expanding, brings up some stuff to me.
I suppose people haven't changed that much. I don't really think that people have really grown more terrible, or developed a greater capacity to be terrible; I think technology and networking have created a greater capacity for terror. Take for instance the events that prompted me to ramble on about this: the terror in Mumbai, India.
I probably wouldn't have cared anymore about Mumbai than other parts of the world that are falling apart, but there are a lot of kids from India at my school, including my best friends, and one of my friends' fathers just left Mumbai yesterday morning. I'm fairly certain he wasn't staying in one of the targeted luxury hotels, but it still seems like a crazy scary place to be right now. So I have a slightly more personal connection. My friend told me, "India is burning and it hurts to watch. ...We just keep praying I guess." She has other family in Mumbai, but I guess they are okay too.
So what made terrorism in India, or any place around the middle east in particular, possible? Beyond human nature, part of it is just the sectarian politics, the way those areas have evolved to be so fractured politically and religiously. It is made possible by an influx of diverse, averse beliefs, doctrines of intolerance. It is also made possible by availability of technology for weapons and networking. The prime minister of India or the British something or others said that they thought the group responsible was working with groups from outside of India. Technology makes this possible. Technology makes it possible, as well, to clean up the damage. It is quite a powerful tool for good and evil.
I was talking to a friend a while back when I was feeling more pessimistic about humanity about the movement of civilization out from its origins. I told her maybe it would have been better if we'd never left the Messopotamia or wherever it was that we all started off. There were wars back then, sure, but the damages seem globally smaller and the differences between people's beliefs seems less pronounced. I don't know. There had to have been a moment, so many years ago, when everyone in the middle east was the same religion. And what is it about those particular religions in that location that made so much friction? In other parts of the world we don't have too much trouble living with people of different religions. I don't get it.
We get mad at people that take this stuff so lightly, that act ignorant like little kids, but maybe the world would be a better place if we held on to the innocent lack of prejudice that we have in childhood and didn't develop all of these complicated biases and hatreds. I think that in The Lord of the Flies by the end of the book the kids are not kids anymore; they have somewhat grown up. But the way they are at the beginning, before the development of division and the capacity for true evil, that is the way that we should be.
That said, I'm not too optimistic. We are not just watching India burn; we're watching the whole world burn. And it's not just technology-aided terrorists; as the Joker says in The Dark Knight, all it takes to turn a city upside down and against itself is one person and a few cans of gasoline. In some ways I think organized terror is a lot less frightening and more sensible than the isolated, senseless crimes I read about on the news such as that one in Canada or something earlier this year when this guy that had never really done anything wrong before randomly took leave of his job and decapitated the guy sitting next to him on the bus, who he didn't even know, for not apparent reason. I guess the idea that people can act in horrible ways for conceivable reasons is less frightening than people acting in horrible ways for inconceivable or nonexistent reasons. The first gives me more faith in humanity and in the revision of such actions. If you believe in something, at least you have some kind of conscience, and it seems like people like that guy on the bus don't have that. Now that scares me.
To end on the bright side, though, the worst in some people does bring out the best in others. Through the worst tragedies we've experienced, we've also experienced the most compassionate efforts of ameleoration. Although I think the 9/11 aftermath was negative in that it involved a lot of hatred towards a terrorist group, which really made us terrorists as well, I think in a way it was really amazing that the whole nation was united together in cleaning up the mess made by the attacks. Irrespective of feelings towards Afghanistan or Iraq or whoever the government wanted to pin the blame on, we truly had a united feeling of compassion for those people in New York as is evidenced by the iconic firefighter as a hero.
I think, really, that that is the only thing holding us together. No matter how terrible we get, those who are not terrible become better, and it provides enough balance that we don't spin completely out of control. However, who knows what's coming.
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