Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.
T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men
In January 49 BC, Julius Caesar made a decision to commit an act of treason by crossing the Rubicon River, which was the barrier between Gaul and Italy proper. There was no turning back. With this act of defiance, he set in motion the events that led to the rise of the Roman Empire and the nascence of modern European culture. History portrays him as the victor.
I started this blog 2 weeks ago and have been trying to get a handle on it ever since. It is not that I lack images - unfortunately there are many all too graphic images: flattened Oklahoma cities, flooded European countries, fires, a German Shepherd K-9 dog pawing the coffin of his dead partner in a final salute: death and destruction spread wide across the earth. My desk is strewn with articles printed off of the internet declaring: "The idea of a totalitarian government monitoring your every move is probably still the stuff of fiction, but that doesn't mean your boss doesn't have a pretty good idea of your workday habits." It continues with, "Experts say an abundance of fast-developing new technology is making it cheaper and easier for employers to read your e-mails, check out what you've been looking at on the Internet, track where you go with a company car or cell phone and find out when and where you were at work."* Another article raises the question: "From invisibility to superhuman strength to telekinesis, a wave of emerging technologies promise to give people powers once reserved for comic-book characters. Which raises an important question: If humans become superhuman, will we turn out to be superheroes - or supervillains?"**
Superheroes or supervillains - which will it be? Seems to me that we have stuffed our noggins so full of information without knowledge; knowledge without wisdom that it is not more information that we need. I do not need superhuman powers to see that we have definitely crossed the Rubicon and there is no turning back. The best that we can do at this point is to slam on the brakes and look at the destruction to the environment, to our civilization, to ourselves that we are leaving in our rearview mirror.
Today as I surfed the net, I came across the poignant story of a former drone sensor operator . While he sat miles away manipulating his computer, the drones he controlled wrecked unspeakable horror on other human beings. He is haunted by the 1,600 deaths that he and his crew are responsible for. The graphic computer images are seared into his brain. In another story, an Army private is on trial because unable to take the horrors of what he was witnessing, he leaked military secrets in an effort to inform the American public of actions he considered to be inhumane and to spark debate.
The Rubicon is behind us; we have crossed the boundary and are on the road to Rome. Are we the victors or the traitors? And if the traitors, what exactly have we betrayed? I would offer the possibility that just perhaps what we have betrayed is our souls and our own humanity.
How did we arrive at this point? We are better educated, fed - in fact in every measureable way, we are better off than ever before in history. This is true even for the poor because they have resources today that even the very wealthy in the past did not. So, I ask again how did we get to this point? We are the end result of the Age of Enlightenment,which was examined in more detail in The Opening post of this blog. Extreme rationality has resulted in a world unmoored from any human moral judgement. Where is compassion? Where is the understanding that what we do to others, we do to ourselves? Where is wisdom? We have not evolved; we have devolved to our lowest common denominator and it is ugly.
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion; ***
Eliot wrote these lines in the bloody aftermath of World War I, The Great War - you know the one to end all wars. He saw the tenuous thread of hope trying to rise above the destruction that had been Europe. And surely, his poet's soul despaired at the folly that is man and the disastrous results of his unchecked rational brain.
This is the dead land
This is the cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.***
I am thankful that I can only glimpse in those lines the nightmare computer images that are etched into the former drone operator's brain. The horror of what washes over me makes me cry out: how many more do we have to kill; how much more money do we need to satisfy the greed that now replaces our souls? We have crossed the Rubicon.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the***
Life is....what? Thine is the....what? Depending upon how each of us answers these questions and how we choose to deal with the shadow that falls between the true reality of who we are as soul beings and the actuality of who we have allowed ourselves to become as hollow men will determine whether this crossing of the Rubicon is the end or the beginning.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.***
Only things of substance have a bang.
Are we on the verge of total self-destruction?
*Life Inc. on Today, May 15, 2013 by Allison Lin
**The Quest to Build Better People. Superheroes or Supervillians? Slate, May 3, 2013 by Will Oremus
***T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men
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