Is The Rocket's Red Glare...Still There?

Is the Rocket's Red Glare…Still There?

There are fireworks exploding outside my condo at this very moment and I am wondering why. What is the point of this garish display?

These pyrotechnics are designed to recall the "bombs bursting in air" and the "rocket's red glare" that inspired Francis Scott Key to compose our national anthem.

At a time when that star-spangled song has become an object of derision for so many elites, why recall those early glorious days of our nation? Better we should look forward to see what type of future, if any, may be before us. Perhaps it's time to stop playing raucous games to commemorate our once great power and leadership in the world.

All that is gone now. Look around you.

We have become a shadow of ourselves, effete and watery and concentrated in our thinking on what is between our legs and the color of our skin.

What are the issues that rile us today? Childish silly questions abound: Who wants to be called by what pronouns? Who has "supremacy?" Who deserves "reparations?" And for what? What new and absurd existential traumas and intersectional transgressions will invade our lives today?

Leadership is non-existent. Government has become Gargantua, a monster loosed of any moral tethers and intent upon a cynical godlessness.

Many religious leaders have lost their voice and their sense of mission. They long ago sold their flocks down the rivers of apathy and apostasy--more concerned with the gathering of money and prestige than gathering souls for God.

Will we ever learn? Where are we going, and why? There are no clearly articulated goals to our popular mass movements. What are the objectives of radical progressivism? Of riotous destruction of life and career and property? Equality? Equity? What does that even mean? And how would we even know if and when we might have achieved it?

Forethought is also non-existent. The here and now rules. The future be damned. We are so sure of our infallibility that we are confident we can handle any adverse eventuality--a theory patently destroyed by our inability to even keep a Chinese virus from upending our homes, our lives, our schools and our children. And we are supposedly wise. We have "experts."

I await the definition of that word.

And is the quasi patriotic ritual of noisy pomp supposed to remind us of our great and glorious past? It is just that. Past. And some question if it was ever great and glorious! We have become an empty shell, with empty minds and empty souls.

Today I suggest, rather than holding our heads high in symbolic celebrations, that we lower them and respectfully ask, nay beg, for mercy from a just judge who even now may be regarding his creation with regret. And rightly so.

Only when we perceive that our world is totally out of whack can we begin to muster the strength to fight against the current, to find the "passionate intensity" of which W.B. Yeats writes. Catholic passion powerfully countered the depravity recently on display at Dodger Stadium and is possibly predicative of a new-found righteous intensity. It is a good beginning.

But when will the nihilistic forces of absurdity begin to question their infallibility? When will we reach the nadir of despair and realize the only way is up because we can sink no further? When will we hit bottom? Are we even close?

Enjoy the fireworks and the circus and the rockets' red glare. But realize they are mere symbols of a once proud and glorious past. The present is in wild disarray. The future lies before us. And we must make it ours.

O! Say! Can you see?