Against Amnesia
Thirty-one years ago we were part of something so extraordinary that it ignited movements for freedom in the rest of the world. We didn’t do it for any families or personalities; we did it for ourselves, to reclaim the dignity and the rights that had been denied us for so long. It was the right thing to do. No one can take that away from us.
At the rally I ran into one of my teachers, and we remarked on the renewed relevance of Yeats.
The Second Coming
by William Butler YeatsTurning 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?
Democracy is a work in progress.
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