No community can survive
that cannot survive the worst.
We lack tragic imagination
that through communal form or ceremony,
permits great loss to be recognized,
suffered, and borne,
and makes possible
some sort of consolation and renewal.

If we are members of a society,
we participate, willy nilly,
in its evils.
How do we reduce our dependency
upon what is wrong?
Wrong will be corrected by practice
and by practical standards.

–Wendell Berry

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Here we are.  Do we lack the ability, a residue of memory enabling us as a people to recognize loss, — the ravening dissonance, the unraveling of rootedness, of love of place, that stitches together the meaning of our common life in this country?  We’ve lost it.  I am not sure where it started.  I suspect that my generation was the one that endorsed the ideal of central state materialism*, to use a technical term.  That’s the idea that what matters most is having more stuff, having more more money to exchange for more stuff.  There was/is a bumper sticker slogan: He who dies with the most toys wins.

What follows is servitude to “the economy,” unqualified obedience to the possessors of capital, the captains of the economy.  We sacrificed the well being of our children, uprooting spouse and children over and over for our professional development.  Or that is how we justified it to ourselves.  We tried to keep up with capital flows, competing with our machines and losing.  Lately unemployment is at a low, but a majority of us are under employed, not keeping up with the rising cost of meeting day to day needs.

The mind scape of many of us is skewed sideways, the result of social media assault.  We elected a failed pitchman, a Marjo Gortner “businessman” who bankrupted a casino.  And he is quite likely to be elected for a second term. 

Clearly we still worship at the altar of that bitch goddess “Success,” mesmerized by the surface flash, the bombast of the latest narcissist.  We are incapable of recognizing failure. 

Like a junkie in a crack house, in a twilight haze as consciousness dims to dark — the needle still in our vein.

*Materialism is a form of philosophical monism that holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions.—the view that all that exists is ultimately physical.

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I envy the ancient Greeks, the Athenians who had the benefit of the three great tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.