Like A Toad
There’s a killer on the road
His brain is squirmin’ like a toadInto this world we’re thrown
Like a dog without a bone
An actor out on loan.
Riders on the storm–The Doors
Riders on the Storm is a haunting Rock paean. Jim Morrison does justice to the dark lyric, singing about id-driven ambition. Blind will-to-power is oblivious to the chaos that is loosed upon multitudes of innocents.
I woke this morning somehow aware that today Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will be meeting with our President at Mar-A-Lago. Abe is to spend two days with Trump. Abe is one of the riders on the storm. Trump is the storm. Abe must be in near panic mode anticipating Trumps meeting with Kim Jong Un of North Korea. Japan is within intermediate missile range of North Korea.
Is that how it’s going to end I ask myself? Rome’s empire endured for hundreds of years, ending slowly by comparison to the rate of change in our own day. Armies took months to march overland, to wreak havoc upon a distant city. Now-a-days only a few minutes are needed for a missile to complete its flight, and then a nano second for the warhead to be triggered.
Recently as I read Plato’s dialog The Phaedo, I wondered if it is possible to have a stable, humanitarian society without ideals. An ideal is regarded as sacred, an indispensable value, universally affirmed, arguably with a divine origin. This is the thrust of Plato’s argument affirming his conviction, his “belief” that ideals are linked to the indestructible soul, the souls eternal existence.
In Plato’s words:
So this is our position, Simmias? he said. If these realities we are always talking about exist, the Beautiful and the Good and all that kind of reality, and we refer all the things we perceive to that reality, discovering that it existed before and is ours, and we compare these things with it, then, just as they exist, so our soul must exist before we are born. If these realities do not exist, then this argument is altogether futile. Is this the position, that there is an equal necessity for those realities to exist, and for our soul to exist before we were born? If the former do not exist, neither do the latter? 76-d
This then is the first thing we should guard against. We should not allow into our minds the conviction that that argumentation has nothing sound about it; much rather we should believe that it is we who are not yet sound and that we must take courage and be eager to attain soundness, you and the others for the sake of your whole life still to come……If you will take my advice, you will give little thought to Socrates but much more to the truth. 90-e
