Light In The Dark Ages

Imagine living between roughly 300-1500 AD. If it wasn’t Goths pounding at the gate, it was the Visigoths.  No sliced bread, Saran Wrap or Scotch Tape. They couldn’t even watch TV by candlelight. But nobody knew it was dark until the lights went back on.

God(ot) was a no-show, even then, as he was during plagues and famines. Yet in his name ploughshares were beaten into swords as crusaders marched off singing Onward Christian Soldiers to teach those infidels a lesson and while they were there they had their sport. After all, everybody needs a hobby. To pillage and plunder was quite acceptable and God threw a blind eye at rape as well.

The Holy Land was the least holy place as dead bodies fertilized the ground. In my mind it is human life which is sacred, not a designated patch of land. Blood was squandered over competing fables and still is.

In Africa it was the same story. As Desmond Tutu put it, When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, let us pray. We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land, which, more or less, brings us up to date. 

Today in the MAGA universe when the potentate blurts and blusters, folks listen, having parked their brains outside the tent. As a miasma of ignorance spreads over our landscape, we watch comic books on big screens. We have become a nation conditioned to violence, vigilante justice and infatuated with power, muscular or by connivance. As in Monday night football, winning is everything.  

And yet occasionally a lotus can be seen pushing up out of the mud. My landlord hired a team of men to prune the trees outside my window. My garden is now a collection of stumps. I have to believe spring will bring a renewal. My faith is in the cycle and, by extension, in the ultimate goodness of our species. We are all upright apes. Have a banana.

As I was driving to a non-power lunch yesterday the thought of road courtesy occurred to me. How we obey stop-signs (more or less), traffic lights, automatic signals and lane changes. How our very driving grants us the opportunity to practice civility. Without it we’d be bumping into each other. For better or for worse we created our own psychic space and have learned to observe and honor our fellow strangers. And no highwaymen as in the Dark Ages.

Before electricity there was and still is a certain light emanating from within. A radiance sparked by the many permutations of love and a luminous shine of charged air as we commune with the firmament and release the stars.