Olivier Messiaen - Twenty Contemplations on the Baby Jesus - The All Powerful Word

Michael Kieran Harvey, piano

I got a bit behind in posting this series due to the bereavement in my family.  There's nothing quite so awful as burring a young person you once took care of as a young child and watched grow up.  Even when it was due to natural but entirely unexpected causes.   I don't know if we get experiences like that so we can use them to understand and sympathize with other people who suffer similar things but since we have them that's about the best use for those experiences.  It's certainly more useful than railing against the existence of God and smartly declaring his non-existence for public consumption among the other would-be smarties.

We're going to be having lots of occasion for mourning, being in a time of reckoning.  We've sown powerful lies in the land and around the world and that crop is in.  Unfortunately, the "enligthenment" philosophy that permitted the sowing of those lies doesn't seem to be having any second thoughts on permitting and empowering those lies so I'm afraid the whirlwind is going to be horrible.  It won't stop until we end or disempower those lies.  And there's no guarantee that is going to happen.  There is nothing special about the United States or its constituent parts that couldn't fall to the same futile violence that other places in the world have fallen into and remained stuck for decades and centuries. There is nothing in the character of the American People which will, in the 21st century reliably lead us to cast off a cleverly brought and maintained fascist government.

The only protection against fascism, the only protection for democracy is the empowerment of the truth over lies and it turns out that won't happen with the insane lassiez-faire regime our Supreme Court set up during the height of liberalism.  The identification of that stupid belief with liberalism was wrong from the start, it was libertarianism which doesn't bring a decent, democratic society, it was permission to lie for the very same media that brought us Trump which was the vehicle for the empowerment of lies and the resultant destruction of democracy.

The only force powerful enough to defeat  the well-crafted, well-sold, attractive and sleazily attractive lies which have gotten us here is the hard truth which is suppressed and which has the disadvantage of being neither attractive nor salacious.  And, I have come to believe, the only force which enables the truth to win is a belief that God commands the truth be told instead of lies.  I don't have any faith that the line of prerequisites for egalitarian democracy to arise or the ability to retain it once in place can exist where that isn't the effective belief of a working majority of people.   That is a grace from God but one which people have to accept.   Where that is accepted, the good-will which is, if anything, exactly as necessary as the truth, will also come.  But that's our choice, it won't be done for us.