Yeats - The Second Coming

Evidently society has felt a sense of decay before, of wrong political directions that morph into provision for citizens of futility. WIlliam Butler Yeats wrote of such a time in merry old England in his poem:

"THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

The first stanza is probably most apropos for the current time in the U.S. The national sense of a new nation of immigrants forgetting their past culture has been clipped by a surfeit of illegal alien Mexicans arriving without severing the culture they left behind. The experiment in Democractic futurism transitioned to a multi-cultural society of people with a foot in the past. American futurists find refuge investing abroad in China or elsewhere.

America's natural advantages that supported the creation of a new nation were perhaps simply the grace of historical non-renewable circumstance. Like Arab nations keen on living in the past-unable to escape from deep ways of historical folkways and memorabilia the United States is being naturally worn down by the wave trains of historical cultures and isn't any longer a unique nation isolated a little from worldly troubles. To a certain extent the self-opinion of the nation as a special place still arises in international politics in a generally deleterious way sometimes simply in order to advantage it's material resource positions.

It may be that the United States or perhaps any other culture cannot bring meaningful social change through evaluation and design intentionally without coercion or historical pressure. The United States for at least a half century has relied upon natural cultural or social evolution following the lines on the emergent worst social values to change or form meta-social structure. The alternative of revolution is as incapable as natural evolution of forming a functioning Democratic social environment beyond a minimal or even nominal status apparently. A culture must rely upon the grace of God to bring opportunities for social reformation as in so much of Biblical history.

Even so the utility of democratic reformation by design that would provide full employment, a recovering environment, stable population and meaningful levels of social egalitarian with equal protection of the law ought to be a present interest of the citizens of the United States. It is the basic social responsibility beyond personal and narrow self-interest.