Why do I return to the old songs, the ballads that search the landscape of love and loss, of faithfulness and betrayal?  Homer’s great tale, The Iliad, is such a story put into verse.

I awakened at 4:30 AM this morning, with the chorus to this song, echoing in my waking consciousness.  Laughing, is written and performed by a Canadian band, The Guess Who.  The song is brutally simple.  It tells of a relationship that never was.  In a backward look, the victim of the imagined relationship, a “stage production” that was never anything else, is able to make a self confession.

You took away everything I had
You put the hurt on me…

Betrayal occurs when one believes what one desires to believe, discounting the evidence to the contrary, all of the evidence.  And the matter is more than just another forgettable, “having lost at love, time to move on.”  The heart of the tragedy is found in the realization that one is limited to just one life, only one opportunity to realize, to make real something unique and of substance of your one life.  What might have been, — the lost opportunity cost.

Time goes slowly, but carries on
And now the best years
The best years have come and gone

The same type of relationship dynamic operates between an entire society and individuals.

Perhaps this example is ill advised to say plainly.  I have to say it out loud, in writing.  This country, this society is charged with failing to make good on the promise of equality, a failure of genuine welcome to all peoples, without taking into account race, ethnic background, or socio-economic class.  The “thumbs down” given by the Republican party to Biden’s Voting Rights Protection bill demonstrates the division between the “have’s” and the “have nots” has never been wider.  The bill was to offer federal protection of the right to vote in the face of red-state’s passage of a slew of laws to quash voter turn out.  It is a class thing, which is projected upon race.  The failure of a relationship that never was.

Lest we forget the wealth and the prestige of the original colonies in the South were derived from human trafficking.  The South fought a war of rebellion preferring death to the abolition of slavery.  In the aftermath of a lost war, exploitation of people of color continued in the terror of the KKK, and through the restrictions of Jim Crow.  That time and those practices have never been repudiated…  The best years have come and gone.

in the land of cotton
old times there are not forgotten…

— Dixieland

Let’s just listen to The Guess Who.