America and Its Discontents

Of course, that title is a riff on the essay by Sigmund Freud about how societies need religion to function. He was not religious but saw the ideals of selfless love, generosity, and care for poor people as foundational for human communities.

The title also riffs on a song that riffs on the Freud essay. Bruce Cockburn’s album Civilization and Its Discontents (1983) has a few lines that help me today in my hopelessness. Many Americans have lost the ability to discern truth and reality. They no longer value truth over lies and deception.

His tune, the title track, has these lines:

        I know a lot about alienated man
        But we’ve all heard as much about that as we can stand
        It’s just what happens when you let the time span catch you napping

then:

        So many people so lost you feel sorry
        But too much pathos just makes you angry
        And even though I know who loves me, I’m not that much less lost

He follows with lines that give me the same feelings I’ve sometimes had in the Grand Canyon:

        Black outline, sliding gray scale
        Subtle variations of dark to pale
        Pearl sky raining light like hail, come on and pierce me
        Raining light like a vision of the holy grail, come on and pierce me

As I’ve gotten older, I still value social action but have had to find ways to remain optimistic despite the lack of progress and feeling that nothing makes a difference. I now believe that trying to illuminate the human condition by writing about it might be just as effective. Not that people pay any attention. Why should they care what some old nobody thinks?

Some other old nobodies spoke prophecies that are still available to us today. From circa 700 BCE, Micah said:

        He has shown you, O Man, what is good.
        And what does the Lord require of you
        but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?

Then, going back another hundred years to circa 800 BCE, Amos says:

        They hate him who reproves in the gate, and they abhor him who speaks the truth.

followed by:

        I hate, I despise your feasts, and take no delight in your solemn assemblies…
        Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps, I will not listen.
        But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Do you suppose Amos and Micah were social workers, getting out of their huts and trying to make a difference over 2500 years ago? Maybe they did, but their words endured; they correctly evaluated things and wrote down their prophecies.

I wrote a blog post a while back (Never See the Light) quoting song lines from Bob Dylan and Bruce Cockburn that, from decades back, are prophetic of America today.

Is it like telling a person gone overboard in the middle of the ocean, “You’re drowning, man!” If words of discernment are not recognized in the current generation, at least they can be recorded for people of the future.

I am not worried about the Earth surviving human-caused climate change. Nature will take care of itself. Not without some extinction! Not without a struggle of species to survive, adapting to rapidly changing conditions.

Something tells me that even humans will not soon go extinct. A few will survive catastrophes caused by natural disasters compounded by human knee-jerk wars with survivalist strongholds and hoarding.

The most important thing is retrieving our respect for truth and reality. How bizarre that people who claim to follow Jesus (who said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free”) should idolize a flimflam man, a consummate bullshit artist who has never considered the words of Micah and Amos, and would never wonder what Jesus thinks of him?

We see Christianity also suffer. It is sick. The more disciplined call on those new millennium Christians to pay closer attention to what Jesus said and taught. Let even Paul, Micah, and Amos be secondary. What about following Jesus?