In The Midnight Hour
It's here.
You wake up one day and this is where you are. You don’t understand exactly how you got here. You thought time was unlimited. You were a searcher with a peculiar curious nature and a vast appetite for facts and data. You just knew as surely as one can know anything that all the mysteries would be revealed. You would come to the end of a long list of inquiries and calculations and just beyond the equal sign, the answer was going to present itself.
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But where you are now doesn’t say that, does it? Where you are now, the calculations back up on themselves. The loop never closes. You’re back where you started, but with decades of accumulated experience. Some of that tells one way, some another. You’re finally coming (grudgingly) to accept fallible limits and inherent contradictions…
…but that doesn’t mean you must be paralyzed utterly into indecision and inaction. There will come a point where you will be at peace not knowing it all. But you will certainly know enough by then, and that is its own kind of comfort. I see an American society today where just about half of us are in that exact place: We know enough. But knowing isn’t by itself sufficient.
What we’ve failed to entirely obtain through knowledge, we’ve learned to compensate in judgement. Judgment allows one the luxury of cutting things short. It can sometimes come across as abruptness or impatience. It’s really just an homage to the sad lessons of a lifetime: Procrastination and temporizing are twin thieves of both time and motion. Verbosity beyond a certain point is equally useless. None of these maladies serve any constructive purpose. Where timing is of the essence (and when is it not?), they do irretrievable harm.
We are at this very moment in the most dangerous period in the modern history of our republic. The next seven months will tell the tale:
Did we answer the threat appropriate to its existential nature? Did we drive it back by whatever means required, at whatever mandated costs to ourselves personally? Or did we falter (over and over again) and fail to meet the big moments with the character and courage our forebearers demand? Did one hundred and eighty-five MILLION of us stand by and allow ourselves to be overtaken by a minority of know-nothing, avaricious criminals who are intent upon laying waste to our noble experiment for all time?
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This is sometimes where I close with a stem-winder, but I’m going to resist that impulse here. There’s no point. We’re at the end of the line. NOW! The next 200 days (at most) will determine whether we move forward as the ongoing hope of the world or take our place upon the littered scrap heap of failed noble causes.