The solstice laughingly occurs for an instant sometime today--just one burp. Laughing because we bid crackling autumn adieu in pure white.
The Beltway area is a mess, people having abandoned their cars in misery, the two surrounding states not knowing the difference between a snowplow and an elephant's ear. More or less, thus confining me to a region that plowed roads that could take me to the train, but no farther than the DC Metro and the confines of the District rather than the new job I was to begin in the suburbs of Virginia.
Even the feds closed up shop, with so many commuters from the "burbs being so trapped.
Plagued by insomnia one night when the snow was so high even the emergency crews stayed home though they know all about plowing, I envisioned reality so completely I almost checked out altogether for this reason: it became crystal-clear to me that the left-wing conspiracy is defeating the right wing conspiracy, which is the real reason why Mitch McConnell is staring back at the cameras like a dead man walking.
The left wing consists of the rapid spread of adherents to Islam all over the world and the proliferation of "illegal" immigrants in this country, 40 million at the last count including the many legitimate U.S. citizens among them already crawling around and smiling at digital cameras adorably, in Spanish and soon English. And don't forget all us Progs.
Or do they all crave the curving, newly blacktopped roads of the frequently treeless suburbs with remotes that open the heavy doors of their two-car garages?
I say the Obama-Hillary duet says it all: twenty-first century man reducing Blue Eyes to giggles at times.
Twenty-first-century woman will soon step into his shoes, someone like Sonya Sotomayor, a self-made woman, rather than Hillary, who will still occupy an important auxiliary role as the world evolves and the slave soon rules the master--where was that first predicted? The meek inheriting the Earth, except that they are anything but meek, even at the level of mopping floors.
What will happen to us boomers who advocated equality for so long? Will we remain white collar professionals or be swept downstairs to the janitor's closet?
My daughter will witness whatever comes next. I want only the best life for her, already at ease in the multicultural societies where she has attended school since ninth grade--she is now a Ph.D. candidate whose research has already involved the barrios of Rio de Janeiro, specifically indigent single mothers in their teens.
I think that the Caucasian race and its stale civilization formed by dead white men is on its way out. The Absurdists believed the same thing many years ago--the staleness of the premises and assumptions that underlay our reality. You know already that it's human limitations rather than staleness, as I see it.
In another hundred years we will all be mixtures of every racial group on earth. I doubt that we will learn how to abstract ideas or truly comprehend the real message of fifth-century Athens even then. Even if they manage to unearth the other 99 percent of lost evidence of what really went on back then.
New realities will rule, new forms of thinking.
Any of us allowed to revisit will marvel, wondering what has evolved, probably incapable of comprehending it. Will we be able to identify all the newness as advancement or retrogression? Will it matter?
All of this will come about if our world exists at all, if everything we've ever known isn't gone forever, devoured by sea monsters and regurgitated unrecognizably, the Earth now 100 percent aquatic rather than the present high percentage.
The white Judeo-Christians have obliterated themselves, offended God too profoundly, to endure.
Humanity will adapt. My great grandchildren will be brown as Nicaraguan eyes. I wonder if any of my writings will survive for them to marvel at. I hope so.
Once upon a time we were offered religions by God but lived so hypocritically that even Jesus stopped being able to absorb all of our sins.
Once upon a time we were so stupid that we spent more energy on creating and updating WMD than on medical research and human rights--not even a Golden Mean balanced the ends of this spectrum, as the ancient Greeks urged and advocated.
Once upon a time ignorance was bliss and erudition useless because it isolated rather than reached out, despite the ideals of the philosophies and religions studied. It existed behind high, wrought-iron fences, Ivory Towers thus pushed aside by Minarets. Those with one foot in each world were too few to make a difference, too obscured by the media to influence those they really needed to reach.
Once upon a time we ignored all warnings about a silent or noisy Armageddon at the turn of the millennium.
Will they learn from us if remnants of our culture survive? Or will they discard them, since ultimately they destroyed rather than built up civilization.
The bottom line of western culture was reaching to our holsters rather than the ideals we professed.
*****
Will this sordid past sink into the depths of Hell or be forgiven? Perhaps a few of us will be admitted into Heaven and most of us occupy Limbo. Maybe we'll all burn for eternity.
Or will we be saved by induced evolution, efforts diverted from the munitions factories?
That's the only solace I can offer, an amalgam of lots of western ideation. I may become that crackpot that even others in Heaven will shun. But most likely my poor soul will be directed to Limbo with a "nice try" button pinned to my gray robe.
Pray to Jesus' Father for forgiveness and hope that the world doesn't shake too hard from the laughter He offers in response. Maybe He'll send Jesus down to deliver one more stanzaic message to us (from James Joyce's "Ballad of the Joking Jesus":
And tell Tom, Dick, and Harry I rose from the dead.
What's bred in the bone cannot fail me to fly,
And Olivet's breezy; good bye now, good bye.
Rise up, evolve, know what you're doing as you celebrate Christmas and then the advent of 2010. As arrogant as we have been, by that much may we sink.
Rise up and evolve.
