We had our small respite from things as they are, languishing as we all mostly were here in the gloom of the moon as it traversed the sun. For a small few minutes we were insignificant, mere pinpricks of importance on the face of a planet in this immeasurable cosmos.
Our small worlds rendered foolish in the vastness.
We can be, if nothing else, grateful to science for understanding and predicting the eclipse and perhaps religion and folklore for its explanations because it must have been quite a ruckus for primitive tribes once upon a time. The not understanding drives us humans to understanding and explanation. Some of us. We don’t want the unpredictable.
We want to know why something is the way it is. It is in our nature. It is why, now presumably understanding the movement of celestial things, we can rest watching an eclipse with the quietened birds and the colours drifting to dark, saturated. Watching as it gradually returns to normal and not be afraid.
As if normal existed now.
It is a distance too far to bridge almost now… the path to normal. We are watching a changing world. To see it from both sides right now is an experience. The far left is convinced that the far right are totalitarianisms and the far right is utterly convinced that the far left are. It boggles the mind some days. How can both be true? But they can be. It is perhaps in this that we can find the long sought end to divisiveness among us all: Totalitarianism is totalitarianism. Both sides can agree. It is what it is, no matter what it is labelled.
Totalitarianism shifts its shadow over the light of all we humans have fought for throughout history: the right to freedom of a society and the individual and peace and the pursuit, albeit difficult sometimes, of happiness. But then there are those who live in a mechanized world where there is a black and white answer to everything and all things need to be controlled so that a prescribed outcome will happen.
Predictability is all they want and they can only achieve it through a kind of worship of power and a kind of blind obedience to a vision of a utopian future. For these groups, there are no greys nor discussion nor other options.
So many of the things the new ideologues want could never be achieved in a free democratic world and so that has to change. They can do it from the left or they can do it from the right but it is almost inevitable the way things are going. And when these things happen, people change. People change. Sometimes, most times, not for the better. The shadows drift at the edge of lives down through the generations. The broken hope. The famished trust. The bewildered pain. The misplaced anger. The children of the world’s history of atrocities will never feel safety again.
How many generations it will take to replace the fear is anybody’s guess. We still see 2,000 year old fear as if it were yesterday in the world today. It rages on the streets and fuels wars and shatters hope. We have not lived long enough perhaps. I do not know.
Hellbound and Down 