The Veil

On the drive in to work yesterday, I was in a sour mood. News floating out from the radio wasn't good; no cheerful melodies to distract me otherwise; and it is the week before the week that is the busiest week of the year. All this general unrest seemed to be seeping through the doors of the car and right into my soul. 

Again, the media is our enemy. It takes a simple act of defiance and runs images for hours, days, weeks, and months, giving it catastrophe status and jamming it down our throats. I am officially irritated by the deluge of uprisings: better toilet paper quality for prisoners incarcerated for being a menace to society; free luxury retirements for Parisians; free college; hand over the jobs, Mister, and no one will get hurt. My head wants to explode with the universal mantra of it's not fair.

Well, who said it would be, is what I want to know? Who promised life to be anything more than hand crafted with the materials on hand, and by the sweat of our brow, built like a house day by day, a foundation first to hold up the walls that eventually holds up the roof.

I remember being young and idealistic: I do. It was gentler then than now, more hippy-philosophical in the way to imagine what you can be or how it will go. And gently, eventually, the fine tune button revealed that it isn't quite that way. As maturity and life took hold, life unveiled itself as not quite as easy as it looked.

So many young people are in the streets in outrage. And I wonder sometimes if the spark of global unrest is coming from their first real face to face with the inequities in the system: what race does to opportunities in a lot of places, and what a lack of education does in even more; and the truth that the wealthy live parallel but separate lives. What I hear in the air, on the radio and tv, all over the net, is the anguish from too much of the veil being drawn away too quickly.

Or, like Wordsworth here, maybe it is the self-admonishment for allowing ourselves to get so far afield with capitalism and greed that we are partners in charting our own ruin.

THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US
          The world is too much with us; late and soon,
          Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
          Little we see in Nature that is ours;
          We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
          The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
          The winds that will be howling at all hours,
          And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
          For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
          It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
          A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;                        
          So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
          Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
          Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
          Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
                                                          William Wordsworth,  1806.