after the news--if it can be called that--of late, songs like America by Steppenwolf are often in my ears, and the grittier protest songs of the 60s, including Helter Skelter...
reading Gibbon's Fall of the Roman Empire, seeing patterns repeat of course, or form and suggest repetition...he observes that Christianity came to the fore because of the hypocritical brutality and dissipation of the Roman elite... but it took a bit (like 300 years) -- it's power, says Gibbons was that it inclined people to be utterly uninterested in the government at any level--not so much scofflaws as just focused on living a simple, clean, and honest life...once that took hold, Christianity *almost* toppled Rome. what happened was, of course, that it took only a few generations for the Popes and papacy to reinstate the corruption at the top--perhaps this cycle, should the species survive its destruction of potable water--will reach a bit higher, last a little longer...
meanwhile, i wonder at the lack of activism in the Hew-Hesse-of Hay... not that the activism of the 60s really did that much so far as antiwar was concerned--but it did move various human rights issues forward... and that was by truly relentless and persistent and inconvenient protest--not one march for one day, but a bloody march every damned weekend, along with many other forms of 'civil disobedience'... so far, folk haven't got the time, don't see how close their/our feet are all to the fire to really invest... I sadly suspect naught will change until anti-Semitism and the imprisonment of LGBTQ folk become part of the repetoire of ICE -- and I am almost certain that at least one of the four new junior women senators will be assassinated -- and if, as i further suspect the administration is implicated (whether correctly or not), well then, we will have a proper "American Spring" just like other oppressed countries!
