A reckoning

And I despair.

We are under relentless assault by the ugly and the diseased.

The broken among us have galvanized. They’ve learned to coalesce. Gathered up into a storm of the lonely, the needy, the disaffected, the damaged, the dull, the desperate, the despairing, the deranged, they are the Whirlwind — our pied-haired punishment for abandoning truth, for deconstructing beauty, for remaining silent while we watched them purposely pick at our civil scabs until we bled and bled and bled.

Monstrous rainbow skies somehow threaten us with pestilence and famine, with endless deserts, scorched earth, forests engulfed in flame — even as water runs effortlessly by us, unused and un-collected. Dismay has become our lot: a moribund society painting its face and tucking its genitals, declaring itself the Light and the Way. Destruction and degradation is depicted as progress and empowerment. And I despair.

We are under relentless assault by the ugly and the diseased.

The broken among us have marshaled their armies, collected through screens and keyboards, millions of distinct wretches pulled from failure’s depths into concert by the common causes of envy and emptiness. They are the cacophony of evil rendered into reels and TikToks and Instagram influencers.

They hate your grace. They hate your having purpose. They despise your contentment, happiness, security, drive, commitment, capacity to love, to empathize, to nurture, to accept. They hate that you won’t share in their misery, or celebrate their perversions. They demand their grubbiness be normalized across society. They seek to make themselves Law. They are demons. And they are legion.

We are under relentless assault by the ugly and the diseased.

Science is rejected. Reason is reduced to a tattered construct, its threads frayed and its fabric disintegrating under the strain of centuries-long wear. It is the protective garment we failed to care for. And its ruin lays us bare.

Truth is contingent, and the real, unknowable. The world is a tissue of grievances and warring wills. Of oppressors and oppressed. Of masters and slaves. Power is the one true thing. It is its own metaphysics.

The broken among us have issued their call to arms. They have declared war on the normative, the natural, the real, the actual. They seek your surrender. They demand your submission. They have the force of a folly we watched them beatify — and the apparatus of raw power available to normalize that folly, to weaponize it, to wield it like a cudgel.

They have their acolytes, their clergy, their Praetorian Guard, their cynical benefactors writing off tithing on their taxes, the cost of doing business. And we did nothing as they slithered into their strongholds.

We slept while they erected their clumsy tyrannies.

They are the poison we picked when we chose ostentation over prudence. Policy papers over moral purpose. The blessings of liberty divorced from the responsibility to protect them from their natural predators. We welcomed glib and empty “kindness” as it moved into spaces where once resided wisdom and discernment. And now we must pay.

This debasement is all by design. It is its own point. It is the axiomatic end to a world deliberately drained of intelligence and reasoned skepticism. It is the reign of unfettered emotionalism and angry entitlement. It is the insistent abandonment of all hope.

We are under relentless assault by a world our hubris and indifference and intellectual laziness birthed. We are products of our own easy vapidity. We are spent, we are beaten, we are resigned — and so we are lost.

We are under relentless assault by the ugly and the diseased.

We are reaping what we sowed. And I despair.

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Buy me a cup of coffee? Lunch? A sports car?