THE PRICE OF SAFETY???

The last man on earth walks into a bar……..
What does he say???

My dear perceptive reader; great men have mused upon what epidemics did to human relationships; how fear and mistrust managed to disintegrate that which had held people together.

The year is 1348. The place-Southern France. The Black Death – the bubonic plague sweeps across the area. Over the next decade, it will claim full ¾th’s of Europe’s population. The infected are shunned, the healthy are feared!! Parents and children don’t eat at the same table anymore; the body politic begins to rot. “You don’t get sick if you stay to yourself” is the prevailing sentiment. Unfortunately, you don’t get well either!

The plague was defining in history. It took the world nearly a century to rise out of the carnage. And when Europe finally recovered, it did so in style!!

The Renaissance- art and culture at their best. The Golden Age of Europe. However, the later years of the Renaissance were black indeed. Immorality and corruption were rampant. The Church itself was not spared. Pope Alexander feared for his life and that of the Church itself. He sent a fiery Dominican monk, Savonarola, to Florence, the heart of the renaissance, a city which made Rome itself pale in comparison, and yet no bigger than 20 of today’s city blocks. What follows is one of the greatest tragedies in the world of art, the Bonfire of the Vanities, the full story of which is told elsewhere. The stage is now set for Christianity to strike back……. The Reformation.

All this because after the dark ages, humans no longer trusted one another. Most didn’t even trust their immediate family. ‘twas an age of betrayal and treachery!

Time heals all, say you?? Strange thing, time. It weighs most on those who have it the least. “The life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”- Leviathan, by Hobbes. Time is the guy at the amusement park who paints shirts with an airbrush. He sprays out the color in a fine mist until its just lonely particles floating in the air, waiting to be plastered in place. And what comes of it all, the design on the shirt at the end of the day usually isn’t much to see. Whoever buys the shirt, the one great patron of the theme park, wakes up in the morning and wonders what he ever saw in it.

We’re the paint in that analogy. Time is what disperses us. Time is no Da Vinci, not even a Rembrandt, just a cheap Jackson Pollock.

I’m not sure what the point of the above is. Perhaps it is just a commentary on the mistrust I see all around us. It is a mistrust which leads to isolation, and much more. How many people do we see around us suffering from depression or analogous disorders?? Ponder this, my dear perceptive reader…….

The last man on earth walks into a bar……..
What does he say???
Drink, I’d like another bartender, please!!