The Second Coming...

Though written almost a century ago in the aftermath of one of the world's most ruinous wars, Yeats' poem is as relevant today as it was then. No doubt after World War I when an entire generation of Europeans were killed, it did indeed seem like the end of civilization. They called it the Great War, the War To End All Wars, for how can mankind suffer such titanic carnage and remain civilized.

But it wasn't the end.

World War II erupted twenty short years later, and then the Korean War came on its heels. Hundreds of millions of men, women and children perished in the fires of furnaces and under the lashes of tyrants. Whether in Nazi concentration camps or in the gulags of Russia and China, the total number dead will never be fully known nor can the horrors be remotely comprehended.

And yet civilization persists...

The fact that it does persist does not prove civilization's resilience to the onslaught of evil in our world. In fact, it alludes to the its opposite. If societies are truly civilized, how can brilliant flares of mind-twisting violence erupt? No, the truth of the matter is civilization is a fragile thing, a thin veneer masking the sins we won't allow ourselves to admit.

Today, the world is falling into a constellation of factors where multiple hideous wars can occur simultaneously across the world, any one of which can spell demise of civilization as we know it. Just the proliferation of super-weapons alone is enough to stop the heart of any man, biological and nuclear weapons in particular. Any third rate power in the world can trigger the death of millions with something as inexpensive as a genetically engineered virus, of which mankind has no natural defense.

In the past, mankind knew how to live off the land. After a catastrophic war, our grandparents and great-grandparents could pick up the pieces and nourish themselves from the food they grew themselves. This is no longer the case. Ask yourself, how many people do you know have the knowledge to manually grow food out of the ground to sustain themselves without any modern technology whatsoever?

I don't know of a single person.

Yeats is right.

The center cannot hold, and severed from God, all things must fall apart...


THE SECOND COMING

By: William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

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 convictions, 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?