The End Of The Innocence

“O' beautiful, for spacious skies
But now those skies are threatening
They're beating plowshares into swords
For this tired old man that we elected king

Armchair warriors often fail
And we've been poisoned by these fairy tales
The lawyers clean up all details
Since daddy had to lie…."

Don Henley from The End Of The Innocence

I have lived through several seismic shifts in our culture, and each one of those shifts has changed me, and I assume, everyone else as well.

When I was younger, I never thought much about cultural shifting. I just rode with it and tried to stay out of the way of anything I thought might turn out to be dangerous to my mental health.

For a writer, which is something I have been since the 1960s, mental health is very important.

As I grew, I found myself working hard to keep my perspective and understand the implications of the changes that were occurring. A lot of times I would be critical of them, especially if they didn’t make much sense to me.

But the older I got, the more I started to see that the world I was living is was one that was in a constant state of turmoil.

In the comfortable and relatively secure middle class world and democracy in which I lived the seismic shifts were mainly something I was observing. Other than the occasional periods of being between jobs, my life was pretty cushy and it was relatively easy to be philosophical about all the stuff that was going on outside my bubble.

That didn’t mean I was apathetic or uncaring. I mostly just felt lucky that my life wasn’t being torn apart by forces over which I had no control.

As I matured as a writer, I also matured as a thinker, and with that came a genuine clarity, at least in my mind, about the things that I was seeing around me. With that clarity came understanding. And with that understanding came an odd sort of peace of mind, all inside the bubble of being in a country where real chaos did not, for the most part, exist.

But during the past couple of years, I have seen the chaos of the world edge closer and closer to my own front door.

What is happening literally 20 miles from where I am sitting right now, is, while, not unprecedented, something that is rippling though my little Canadian bubble.

And what it signifies to me is that even when you think you are safe and removed from the fray, you’re actually not.

The chaos in America today is something I have never experienced this up close and personal in my life. Maybe it has a lot to do with the fact that it’s in my face a lot more, because of all the media channels that are being dominated by it.

But it is nonetheless, quite unsettling. Because the clarity I have from my perch, now  just slightly removed from it all, is becoming more and more subjective, as the degree of insanity grows and flows and infects us here.

You can agree or disagree with the politics of what is happening, but if you can’t see the insanity of it, then I would strongly argue that you have your head stuck deep in the sand.

The US is my country’s largest trading partner. 70% of our exports go there and so our futures are inextricably bound by economics, as well as a shared belief in freedom and democracy.

But there is something very wrong down there. And I believe it is taking that country to a place where it has never been and really and, at its core, does not want to go.

The fear, hatred and divisiveness that it being generated in America these days is not just hype. It’s real deal and it’s becoming more and more pervasive as it spreads.

I have been a close observer and honestly have not, since the early seventies, seen this country in the kind of turmoil in which it finds itself. It feels very much like the beginnings of a huge seismic shift in the world order. And it scares the crap out of me.

I titled this piece The End Of The Innocence, because that’s exactly how I see it. My only hope is that the light at the end of this tunnel is not a runaway train coming at America. My concern is echoed by an ever growing number of people who are much smarter and better informed than I am. But it is the same concern.

America is being steered off course by people who are all in over their heads, are being led by someone whose only agenda is self-enrichment and being manipulated by others whose agendas very much appear to be about blowing up this democracy and replacing it with who knows what. It is corruption, deceit and cultural shifting on a scale we have never seen before.

And it really needs to be stopped before it's too late.

That is not a political statement. but a fact based on everything that everyone not wearing political blinders or rose-coloured glasses, can see very clearly.

The End Of The Innocence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVGbE2vWiK4

jim out.