I watch the world around me and I wonder what will become of us. With our currency losing its value, with our access to the oil that has driven so much of our economy and infrastructure drying up and with our general lack of faith in the future what is to happen next? Mired in a war without end and without direction where will we find hope? I am not sure. Only KBR and the war profiteers seem to be prospering. What I do know is that this isn’t a new feeling to people who have watched this cycle carefully.
“It always gets back to the same thing. I have dutifully done my bit. I have been “open to the world.” That is to say, I have undergone my dose of exposure to the American society in the 60s-particularly in these last weeks. I love the people I run into, but I pity them for having to live as they do, and I think the world of U.S.A. in 1967 is a world of crass, blind, over stimulated, phony, lying stupidity. The war in Asia slowly gets worse and almost more inane. The temper of the country is one of blindness, fat, self-satisfied, ruthless, mindless corruption. A lot of people are uneasy about but helpless to do anything against it. The rest are perfectly content with the rat race as it is, and with its competitive, acquisitive, hurtling, souped up drive into nowhere. A massively, aimless, baseless, shrewd cockiness that simply exalts itself without purpose. The mindless orgasm, in where there is no satisfaction, only spasm.”
-Thomas Merton, 05-27-67
The more things change, the more things remain the same.
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