Lines To Remember 2 (A Country's Malaise)

"Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high:
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
by narrow domestic walls;
Where the words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into
The dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening
Thought and action-
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake."

(From Gitanjali)

(an abridgement of an earlier post)

I can understand necessity as a strong motive that got us into the morass we are in. The motivation of a hungry stomach, the shivering cold of the homeless, the exaggerated sense of gratitude of sycophants placed in undeserved positions, those in close proximity, relatives and cronies scrambling at crumbs like remoras clinging to a shark, those under some kind of duress and those overly paid doers of the unthinkable deeds on behalf of the big ones of both the opposition and the administration. While these do not mitigate their acts there is at least an iota of an explanation for their behavior.

How else could one explain the loyalty of a coterie of supposedly good and honest men who are given high posts or the loyalty, however evanescent, of the corrupt military.

Then there is the Media. It is lamentable the way they have succumbed to the lure of the lucre. There isn’t an hour on prime time where you don’t hear the playing up of rumors and the unsubtle goading of media personalities to fire up the emotions of the rabble. Media in their advertising blurbs unabashedly declare how virtuous and courageous they are in airing without fear and with impartiality the current events; but aren’t these just readings of scripts in press kits provided by partisan groups?

They are purveying hellish heralds that would make Goehring’s Nazi propaganda look amateurish. The forces of the dark side have harnessed the best and the brightest of our communicators. It has not spared the brightest sons and daughters of our advertising community. They have lent their expertise to forward the cause of the damned.

More than ever I am now convinced that robber barons are descended upon us. I am enjoining the young and decent, the still uncorrupted to fight and if you cannot beat them don’t join them but flee to climes where you can raise your children in an upright way, where heroes are truly deserving of emulation, where the corrupt rich are shamed rather than idolized.

I see little hope. Given another ten years most of our precious young would have joined the legion of damned or if they are not able to join they would be wallowing in the misery of poverty or be a part of the hunted underground community of the upright, the decent, and the respectable.