I was driving to an appointment in Mar Vista, going down a wide stretch on Venice Boulevard this past Friday. It was the first day after Thanksgiving, and the ease of traffic, provided proof that traveling was back again, after the insanity of the Covid lockdown now seared into private and historical memory.
Another lovely sunny day as is California's wont, but coolish, so that we have some idea that it is in fact close to winter in what I used to think as a paradise on earth.
I was flipping Sirius channels and landed on the Broadway Channel which generally I pass up. They seem to me to play rather remotely known music from remotely known shows. But I stayed this time because "Shall We Dance" from the original 1951 show "The King and I" had just begun. I hadn't quite been born when that show first ran, but I am a child of the 1950s and early 1960s, and I was swept into a time and place that does not exist any longer. And I found that several emotions rolled like dominoes. The first was pure pleasure and happiness. Then wistfulness. Then outright sadness as I happened to pass a large bus stop ad for a new movie or television series, "The Sex Lives of College Girls". I had been pulled back into our time and its crass self-absorption with all things dark and dirty painted with verbal gold and enforced with shouts shaming anyone who challenges the societal gaslight. What a great civilization whose art includes Santa hawking a "Violent Night" another ad that is splayed all over the place.
I cannot remember how many times in the past, especially when I was a teenager in the later 1960s, a person of a certain age, my father, my aunts, my grandmothers, would say, that things weren't like the old days, shaking their heads in dismay. I surely understand that now, especially as it seems that the wheels have come off the proverbial bus in terms of what is considered good and what is considered verboten, a complete reverse of any time I can remember in modern history.
Here's the thing for me. I have to say that even as that teenager in the later 1960s I already had a queasy feeling that they were right, that this time in which I was enduring adolescence, difficult enough under the best of circumstances, was already venerating a kind of freedom that emphasized the worst elements of human nature, in the guise of elevating it. This was the age of "Don't trust anyone over the age of 30!" "We're the young generation and we've got something to say!" said the manufactured television group, The Monkees. The inherent idiocy of the statements might now be manifest as anyone who is still alive from that time (three of the four Monkees are not alas) is older than I am, deep into senior citizenry. Yeah. America has changed. You tell me if it was for the better. If sex, drugs, rock n' roll, relative morality enforced by power, the banishment of God and objective morality in favor of the secular flavor of the day, and a hierarchy based on race and identity which makes Martin Luther King's hope for a world that judges each of us on the content of our character meaningless, works for you, then it is better.
In the 1960s, I was aware of the decay, but there was still a basic agreement on the rules of life even amid the various culture skirmishes. And, I was involved in getting through adolescence and becoming an adult as best as I could, as best as any of us could. But over time the decay has turned to rot, and those who control our lives, the government leaders who are as far removed from any idea of statesmanship as a leader could be, the universities, the media, insist that there is no rot to be seen.
And our experts wonder why drugs and suicide and mental illness is on the rise. They cannot seem to make the obvious connection. Or perhaps, they simply refuse to do so. Whoever it is that wants all the power and wants you and I medicated or crazy or restrained may very well be content with the state of affairs.
For myself, I find this world, barely bearable, and if it were all there was in my life, I could well be crazy or suicidal. In fact, I am pretty certain I would be.
You can laugh at the Bible all you want, should that be your disposition, or religion, like Catholicism, which is also under assault, from within and without; but knowing that the very thing that is happening in our world, in our nation, was expected and prophesied and warned of by God Himself, and that my job, my sole job, is to stand firm (biblical New Testament phrase) with His Grace, so that when I am judged I will not be lost to Heaven is all that keeps me going. Not easily for I become weary very often and I have to be constantly reminded of God's plan and not demand that He reveal it to me now, in the thick of the quagmire of daily life. But what is always clear when I stop to think, truly think, is "What's the alternative?" If you believe that there is nothing after this life, then I guess it's easy. If you don't believe in Hell, and that there is no Judgment by a Creator, then I guess it's easy.
But I do believe in Judgment, Heaven and Hell, and everything that's happening around me tells me that they are very very real. I surely did not want to live in anything that resembled the end times (whether it is or not I cannot know), but here I am, where God wants me, and anyone alive now. It truly is the worst of times, and, I suppose, if you are a religious person, it might well be the best of times. History has been full of such times. Only God knows when the fullness of time is for His return in history.
