Slouching Towards Paris

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...

Most of us recognize these opening lines of William Butler Yeats' poem, The Second Coming.  Most of us have probably never read past these four ominous lines. When I heard about the terrorist attacks in Paris, Yeats' words were ringing in my head. Our world is falling apart. We cannot (or choose not) to hear what each other is saying, needing, hoping. What scares me most is that, in this year of violence, from bombs to bullets to drowning refugees fleeing more bombs and more bullets, the ubiquity tricks me into thinking this is now normal. It tricks and tempts me into not caring, into turning off the news and magnifying my comparatively minute struggles. 

This needs to stop.

For the first time since discovering Yeats' four lines many years ago, I decided to keep reading.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

Yeats could have been a psalmist.

Surely some revelation is at hand.

Surely by now every child in the world could go to school. Surely by now we'd be on our way to alleviating poverty. Surely by now our world would have no qualms with investing in our best defense: the wellbeing of its most vulnerable. Our Least-Likely-To-Succeeds. The people who don't receive the lovingkindness, security, or dignity they deserve as human beings, because of racism, colonialism, war, and despotic governments. In closing, Yeats asks,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

His idea of a 'second coming,' a 'revelation,' something to shake up the world, is vastly different than the Christian image of innocent, little baby Jesus. I love the image of slouching towards Bethlehem, because it implies how hard the journey towards light and love, and justice--towards true transformation--truly is. We wish we didn't have to, and our feet drag. Our shoulders hunch and our backs curve from the weight of our burden, but we carry it, because it is what we must do. 
It will be our gift to the world, to never stop slouching.