Something Evil This Way Comes...

 

 

 

 

"The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it."

Albert Einstein

 

I can feel it. It is as discomforting as it is unsettling. It consumes my daytime musings and then disturbs my nighttime rest. When thinking about it too long or too much, it causes a queasiness in my stomach and a unnatural tingling in my skin. I sense it is on the horizon and will be upon us soon. There is no place to go, there is no place to hide. What is coming  is evil. Not the personification of evil, but evil itself.

 

I have borrowed the idea for the title from the Ray Bradbury book Something Wicked This Way Comes. I felt this would set the tone like no other phrase could. The evil that approaches has nothing to do with the season of Halloween, nothing to do with the growing darkness of the fall season. The evil which approaches will turn love to hatred, interest to apathy, citizenship to insularity. 

I had written about this before. I have never been more concerned about a major election in this country. It has nothing to do with who wins - it has to do with the aftermath. I am very concerned that we might have a repeat of the last election - "We won, you lost". As poorly as that was received four years ago, it would be catastrophic today. Our great Republic has become bifurcated between winners and losers, red and blue, rich and poor, makers and takers and so on. Our tax code has become nothing more than a weapon of legalized theft as the wealthy have become eschewed by those who are not. In short, we are a mess.

The evil coming will cloud our perspective, muddy our history. Values which made our country great will be replaced with selfish entitlements to things of which there are no claim. "Hard work will pay off" has been replaced with "Where is mine?". Facts have become ignored or interpretive as the numbers which describe our dire financial condition have become meaningless. Yes, evil is coming, and it is looking for fertile ground in which to dwell.

Years ago, when the Cold War was young, then Premiere Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union told us they would "bury us". While most took this as a nuclear threat, Khrushchev later went on to explain it would be the ever growing conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie that would be our undoing. Even though spoken almost sixty years ago, Khrushchev was describing the fertile ground that evil was looking for. We were warned, we have seen this coming as a slow motion juggernaut for decades, and now it is almost here.

Yes, evil is upon us. It can only be defeated with the goodness in our hearts which allowed us to forge this great country by living E pluribus unum  (Out of many, one). To forget that, to reject that in favor of tribal rivalry, makes us no different than countries wrought with sectarian violence. We owe our forefathers better, we owe our children better, we owe ourselves better.