A Thankgiving Day pondering.
(Note, this is one of many post that was lingering in the draft section for years, and was only now posted).
Something has happened . . . some ground moving departure from reality in the West. But was it a slow evolution, or a rapid one. Has it always been occurring, and does that mean perhaps we're just on the crest of a big wave, and some future generations will look back and see this era as simply insane?
When you are in the midst of something, it's not really obvious that it's occurring until it's far advanced, whether that change is for good or ill. I'm sure, for example, Neanderthals didn't appreciate that the arrival of Cro Magnons in the neighborhood signaled the end of their human line, as for the very first of them, it didn't. The first Shoshone to meet a European American probably didn't think; "well. . better ask for a reservation bordering the Wind Rivers right now". . . that's not how human experience work.
But at some point, at least for the observant, that day does arrive when you can look out and say "this is really amiss", but that doesn't mean that you grasp how it went amiss.
Well, things are amiss.
That's been obvious to me for a long time, but not to the degree to which it currently is, and not with what seems to be the clarity which I think I have on it now. But, suffice it to say, at some point we boarded the train to unnatural existence, and it's plaguing us now. Getting back will not be easy, and while I think nature and providence always self correct, I won't live long enough to see that correction.
It's important to note, when you state such things, that a perfect past never existed. Other people, who sense something is wrong and turn their gaze back, far too often imagine a perfect past in some distant era. That was never the case. There was never a Camelot.
And even if there might have been a real Arthur of some sort, and even if he was a chieftain of some type, it was still the case that for most people the world hasn't been prefect.
Being a Medieval lord, in other words, may have been grand, but eking out your existence on a handful of oats and barley every day as a bound serf. . . not so much.
And so with every era. Being a Roman magistrate would have been nifty, probably. A Roman slave? Not. Being an American in 1830 would seem cool to me. . . as long as I wasn't black or an Indian on the border of lands about to be consumed by the American nation.
You get my point.
But one thing that has occurred since those times, or at least since the late period of the Roman Empire, is that we, and by that I mean Western Society, and which by that I mean the force that seems to drag the entire world along with it, has slipped into some sort of perverse anti-natural state.
How did that happen?
And when did it start to occur?
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