Jeremiad

I cannot shake the thought that the cold times are coming. The feeling of malaise now doesn’t seem to want to
leave. I cannot say that I am depressed as I am about as happy as I have ever been, but the sense of foreboding
around me just seems to deepen.
More and more I am thinking that there is a reckoning coming. Not just for my pathetic excuse of a job or my
less than excessive lifestyle, but for the society that I swim in. There does not seem to be any sense of
accountability, spin rules all. But the reckoning will be a spasm, and the really hard part will be to weather the
storm and wait until things settle down.
The real issue is that there is no concept of restraint. The zeitgeist is that there can be no constraints on the
individual. But this allows too much room for the flawed vessels that make up our race to move in. We consume
and consume, unwilling to take less or to save because there is no future, only the infinite now. We rationalize
the things we buy as necessities, somehow different from the self-serving opulence of the past. But it is all the
same, subtle differentiations of class and power designed to make those around you aware of your status.
When we come to the reckoning, we will be in a crisis, because all that we have built is a reaction to the past.
We are the new puritans, creating a set of oh-so-carefully crafted mores and enforcing them with a puritan’s
zeal. But there are no roots to what we have created. We threw out the baby with the bathwater. So the past can
provide us no guide to find our way out of the morass, and the sad set of rules we have created will not be up to
the task.
So we use up our finite resources because we don’t know what else to do. We spend energy extravagantly to
fuel our mobility and freedom and our drive for the cult of the self, and by doing so shackle the future to less.