By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
‘It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered, full of darkness and danger they were. Sometimes you didn’t want to know the end, because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when there’s so much bad that had happened? But in the end it’s only a passing thing, this shadow; even darkness must pass.’
– Samwise Gamgee, The Lord of the Rings
Like many of you, I’ve been looking out on the world with a sense of awe at its growing instability and deterioration. I was slightly comforted by Fareed Zakaria’s message to Jon Stewart last night that “things have been worse,” but not a lot. Real-time mayhem has a potent kick, and as Eric so succinctly pointed out on Friday, we don’t seem to be making much progress, cycling and re-cycling the same old stuff, the basic foibles of humankind. Me, I’m mouth breathing over how much intellect we seem to have lost in the last fifteen years, how much fire in the belly for justice and civil rights we’ve surrendered in the last fifty or so.
I ran across a little news story this week that seemed to me the epitome of our national disconnect with reality. A Tennessee man walking in a Walmart parking lot with his young son was passed by a car going way too fast. Startled, he yelled for the driver to slow down, prompting her to stop, get out of the car and come at him with a loaded gun, threatening to kill him. He told her he was going to call the cops and she told him to go ahead, she had a gun permit.