Points of View. Gathering?

The truth is out.

People are coming around to agreeing that we have an ecological nightmare on our hands.

Many religious people feel they have to take care of God’s Planet.

Businessmen are realizing that it makes good green-financial sense to be green.

And intelligent, conscious people have known this for years.

Why is it that it takes people so long to come around? (To Galileo, to Newton, to Darwin?)

My hypothesis of why the religious and the mercantile groups can’t agree with the academic-humanists and why they must wait until it hits them in an entirely different way.

1) The Religious find thinking people to be very cold. As awful as Religionsists are, there is a certain zing in their connection to God, Church and Man. These Religionists want everything to come to them through God—what really is nothing more that warm fuzzy opiate that Marx so often spoke of. If it isn’t warm and Godlike, then it can’t be real. Once they see God’s handiwork being destroyed, however, they start coming around.

2) Businessmen just find the thinking man to be lazy. If a thinking man was any kind of man, he would get off his ass and do something. Build something. Bully a widow into giving away her last fifty-thousand dollars. The businessman has no respect for the thinking man unless the thinking man is coming up with another widget that the businessman can sell. Once they see their empires crumbling because of unsustainable business practices, they start to come around.

Though thinking people are always reviled for challenging the status quo, would it not be so much easier for the Religionists and the Capitalists to accept that most change, at least before and after the dark ages, has been fomented by thinking men? But then, that would require really thinking about it.

I don’t care how smarmy out next president is, as long as he can bring these groups together under a platform of change. We wait.

THE SECOND COMING—William Butler Yeats

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of i{Spiritus Mundi}
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?