The Times - Are They a-Changin?

       Right now the only predictable election result next week is the dangerous public disenchantment stretching from Texas to North Dakota.  After November 8th we are likely to find scattered all over the ground only the remains, the shards, of the Republican and Democratic parties regardless of who is elected to the White House.  That may turn out to be the good news.

        Also broken into pieces after next week may be the long era of U. S. civil religion since 1800 which people thought promised them exceptional treatment but now seems parallel to the empty promises of contemporary political leadership. The unproductive distance between party machine candidates (Hillary) and rebels (The Donald) resembles the lived experience of three-fourths of Americans who for twenty years and longer have suffered an income stagnation that nether Republican Bush nor Democrat Obama corrected. This while the public's money poured into the fifteen year Bush/Obama war which keeps expanding.  

        The massive slaughter of the innocents in the lands of that other denominated religion, Islam, contain the worst kind of news: It's well known, of course, but the ultimate irony must be grasped: that the boundaries of the Middle East and the weapons flowing into it (some from Russia also) were are all determined and made by the Christian West: the boundaries by the European powers after World War I; the weapons by the U. S. after World War II. Essentially they're all ours! The irony is the so-called Christian Western nations fashioned a kind of hell among the Islamic nations.

        It is a hard truth but in the possible collapse of politics as we've known it both believers and non-believers will find themselves reckoning with the end of what had seemed a liturgical guarantee for exceptional America, an everlasting springtime now come to winter.

       The end of Tom Hayden's life last week can remind us of the true vocation of the prophet--whether secular or sacred--who in Hayden's instance shouted out against the hundreds of thousands dying in the Vietnam war while most of the the American churches and synagogues, for patriotic reasons, backed away from what for Martin Luther King, Jr. was a similar cry against that war he could not stifle in himself.  

       A new way must be found amid the ruins to reclaim this prophetic vocation in spirit and in truth. The times are still trying to change, Bob Dylan, and maybe this time you'll be right, in honor of your Nobel Prize.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin

              For the times they are a-changin