This morning I was moved by the description in the New York Times of the hundreds of criminal prosecutions in the aftermath of the January 6 uprising at the Capitol in Washington.  This from the Times:

 If someone is being criminally prosecuted, there’s often some dysfunction in their past. But I’ve been struck by how trauma rests at the center of so many of the Jan. 6 defendants’ lives, whether it’s poverty, addiction or deep family dysfunction. You also see defendants say things to the judge like, I’ve lost everything because of what I did on Jan. 6. My job has been taken from me. My neighbors no longer talk to me. My church has essentially excommunicated me. Please don’t send me to prison as well.

To read the report by the New York Times CLICK HERE.

As an apt description of our times I offer these words by José Ortega y Gasset published in 1930.

Men play at tragedy
because they do not believe in the reality of the tragedy
which is actually being staged in the civilized world.

A hurricane of farcicality,
everywhere and in every form,
is at present raging over the lands of Europe.
Almost all positions taken up and proclaimed are false ones.
The only efforts being made are to escape from our real destiny,
to blind ourselves to its evidence, to be deaf to its deep appeal,
to avoid facing up to what has to be.

We are living in comedic fashion, all the more comic
the more apparently tragic the mask adopted.
The comic exists wherever life has no basis
of inevitableness
on which a stand is taken
without reserves.

-excerpt The Revolt Of the Masses by José Ortega y Gasset p. 105

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A tune, give us a song, a banner under which to muster courage in order to create the future…  This is not one that I’d typically choose, but it seems right…

Some final words from Ortega:

The cynic did [does] nothing
but sabotage the civilization of the time.
He was the nihilist of Hellenism.
He created nothing, he made nothing…
The cynic, a parasite of civilization,
lives by denying it,
for that very reason that he is convinced
that it will not fall.

–excerpt The Revolt Of the Masses by José Ortega y Gasset p. 106

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