'A Blog Oasis' Week 3

The world is now right on the skids
‘Cos it forgot the adage which bids
Us recall, with our birth
We don’t inherit the Earth:
We hold it in trust for our kids.
Gregory Dark

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
Lawrence, D.H., ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, opening line
In fact, most of the ages of history have been tragic ages. Some merely more tragic than others. One of history’s most devastating tragedies indeed is that we, as a race, seem not to have realised that. In large part because we have failed to learn that lesson, today’s age is quite possibly going to be the most tragic of all – until tomorrow’s, which might well be its last.

We’re doing precious little today we haven’t been doing since time immemorial. Throughout history the privileged few have luxuriated at the expense of the impoverished many; we have all (in one way or another) been exploiting Nature’s resources and our fellow-man; we have taken rapaciously and given miserly; we have mistaken the specious for the special and the gaudy for the valuable. Politicians, throughout history, have been self-seeking and corrupt; priests have been self-seeking and venal; magnates and generals self-seeking and ruthless … And we? We have been self-seeking and compliant. Our only difference today is one of scale. And of reckoning. There is a day when chickens come home to roost. I fear such a day is today. Or tomorrow.

The tragedy of our age is so manifold that it is almost impossible to recognise the scale of the tragedy. Perhaps that’s why – still today – we refuse to take it tragically.
But it does also seem to me that this age is one equally of boundless opportunity … of a potential without limits. If we are to survive today’s tragedy we will need solutions so radical that many of the evils which we have historically harboured as a species will simply have to be addressed. Either that or we perish. Certainly in terms of anything we have heretofore known as civilisation.

Let’s find one thing in ourselves today, sweetheart, one fault we need to address. Let’s start preparing ourselves for a radical change in our society and our world.


“Rookies,” barked the sergeant from Wycombe,
“It’s not never, sir, into shape I can’t lycombe.
I begins treating them finer
Than Dresden bone chiner.
But when that do not work, sir, I kycombe!”
Gregory Dark