Rome | The Direction of Intention

No Surprise [David’s blog on KS Friday]

Posted on January 10, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

“…the larger story of this moment is the plunder of public land for private gain.” ~ Historian Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From An American, January 7, 2025

When future historians ask the question, “What the heck happened to the United States of America?” they will need only look to Heather Cox Richardson’s encapsulating phrase: the plunder of the public for private gain. Were I one of the future historians I would title my book, The Nation That Ate Itself.

Our Achilles Heel? We worship business above all things so believe everything should run like a business. Government-by-transaction is no way to run a country. The natural conclusion of a nation that confuses public-service with business is the blatant exploitation of its people. It inevitably divides and feeds on itself. I would conclude my imaginary-future-history book with this: “It was inevitable and calculated. Their demise was no surprise”.

We watched the storm roll across the lake. The clouds were ominous and roiling yet the colors were gorgeous. It’s the reason we stopped. The visual collision of beauty and menace. While Kerri snapped photographs I was awash in metaphor (of course). The coming storm.

Our fall is not so different than the fall of Rome. When wealth is consolidated at the tippy-top and controlled by a gluttonous few, a once powerful nation tips over. It’s simple physics. Feasting on the people, the nation rubs its fat belly and decides to protect the privilege of the few over the health of the many. History repeats itself and, as we’ve written of Rome, our demise like theirs, is not and will not be a surprise. Root rot.

Kerri believes that, as people age, they do not change but become more of who they really are. Life boils them down to their essence. The same might be said of our nation. The plunder of the public for private gain is endemic in our system.

There is no mercy in the god of transaction. There is no morality in a worship made hard by the fundamentals of bottom lines. The church of Dog-Eat-Dog has little use for truth.

When asked the question, “Why did so many of the plundered public vote for their own demise?” the future historians will smile and answer simply, “They were manipulated by their social-media-masters into seeing their neighbors as dogs-to-be-eaten.”

Communal root rot. The mighty tree falls. No surprise.

Kerri’s albums are available on iTunes and streaming on Pandora

read Kerri’s blogpost about THE STORM

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Filed under: KS Friday, Metaphor, Perspective | Tagged: artistry, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, gluttony, Heather Cox Richardson, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, mercy, morality, plunder, plunder of the public, private gain, Rome, story, studio melange, the melange, transactional | 3 Comments »

Speak Truth To Rot [David’s blog on Merely A Thought Monday]

Posted on January 8, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative

The morning is cold and it snowed last night. The world is coated in white. A raucous murder of crows brought me to the kitchen window. I found the black birds cawing on the white snow both beautiful and foreboding. Edgar Allan Poe stepped in the room. Dostoyevsky. I have a dubious history with crows so they are at once fascinating and spine-chilling.

When I heard the crows I was reading about the fall of Rome. I’m not sure how I came to be reading about ancient Rome since I was searching for something else. I got snagged, followed the thread and went down a rabbit hole. I stopped on the phrase “political rot.” A poet’s phrase.

An Alice-in-Wonderland reference is apt for how I feel of the politics of our time: down a rabbit hole. Yesterday Kerri asked if a politician-in-the-news was a democrat or a republican and I answered, “I’m not sure anymore what a republican is…” Not an answer to her question; more a sad statement of our predicament. We will fall, like Rome, not because of the thunder-lies spewed by an angry man who would be emperor, but because of the complicity of those who remain silent so they, too, might stay in power. The very definition of political rot.

400 years separate Martin Luther and Martin Luther King. The first could no longer remain silent to the corruption of the church so he nailed his 95 Theses to the door. The second, Martin Luther King, could no longer remain silent to the horrors perpetuated on black citizens in “the land of the free…” For speaking out, Martin Luther was excommunicated by the church and condemned as an outlaw by the king. Martin Luther King was assassinated for giving voice to our national shame.

It takes courage to speak truth to rot. Rot never takes kindly to the voices of veracity.

Take heart. Rot always falls while truth reveals itself through the smoke and devastation.

Consider these words, spoken by Martin Luther and 400 years later by his namesake:

“You are not only responsible for what you say, but also for what you do not say.” ~ Martin Luther

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” ~ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

So much silence.

In my Roman read, two other phrases caught my eye, the very blossoms of political rot: “Civic pride waned…” and “Roman citizens lost their trust in leadership.” In complicit silence, history has no alternative but to repeat itself.

read Kerri’s blogpost about SILENCE