Something Wicked This Way Comes*

(Source)

You know the feeling. It's a pleasant summer day, the sun is shining, the birds are singing, but there's something in the air. Something causes the hair on the back of your neck to tingle. Though we are far from our primitive roots, there are still things which cause our hackles to rise.

If we live in a place where the horizon is far away, where the vistas are sprawling and vast, you might eventually notice the clouds on the far horizon are gathering. If you are out where the noise pollution of civilization is minimal, you might hear, at some level of your consciousness, the deep rumble of thunder.

Something is out there. Will it come this way?

Soon the sky darkens further, wisps of the storm are cast ahead of it, like cavalry scouts probing ahead. Lightning can be seen, sharp bolts against the black, what once was blue sky short moments before.

There are days when the wind shifts, the storm dissipates, or carried by the wind it moves away, to trouble some other land. But then there are the days where the wind rises, you can smell the wetness of the precipitation not yet reaching the ground. You can smell, almost taste, the ozone as the clouds discharge the lightning.

Then, almost before you can react, the storm is upon you. If shelter is close, you rush for it, if not, you cast about for some safe place. You know you are going to get wet, then a blinding flash and a near simultaneous crack. You seek the low ground, trying to maintain a low profile. Atavistic instinct takes over, you are now more animal than human. All your rational thought flees, you are unprepared, you are caught in the open.

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The storm has already broken out over Europe, floods of "immigrants" make their way into the citadels of learning and culture, changing all they touch. They clamor for their "rights," they demand change, they demand adherence to their archaic, medieval doctrines. There is no escaping them, the guardians of the West have dropped their guard, they have unmanned the watchtowers. Though told this would happen, they did not listen.

For they are the great elite. They know better, they went to the right schools, they have the right friends, they believe the right things. They say to themselves, if only we understood them better, if only we try harder to accommodate their desires, their demands.

My friend the Cap'n has written of this concern. As he has many times. I'm not sure if I have lost my faith in the West yet, though as the elections loom, that faith in civilization is wavering.

I feel like a sergeant in the rear ranks, trying to get the troops to maintain their alignment, their order. Yet somewhere over my shoulder, I hear a rumbling, a dull thumping in the air. Is that a storm, is that artillery? To whom to those cannon belong? Are they ours, or do they signal the approach of some foe?

I know not. 

Yeats seems appropriate. Something is definitely coming. I can feel it in my bones...

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 Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;

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

Wind 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? 

(Source)

* With apologies to Ray Bradbury.