Getting Closer To Labor Day and the End of Summer

The closer we get to Labor Day and the End of Summer, the more apprehensive I become. It's a form of conditioning, I guess, driven by an understanding that the first week of September has turned into the pivot of the year, and what follows is often horror almost beyond comprehension.

Summertime events can be bad or they can be foolish, but after Labor Day, things get real. Real and often harsh.

This year seems to be soaked in the blood of innocents and the somewhat off-kilter. It's a matter of police killings by the great gross, one after another, all over the country, now well over 1,000 dead at police hands -- don't believe the "400 annually", it's a deliberate deception to make you think that "well, it's not so bad". But it's much more than that, too. The US has been engaged directly or peripherally in numerous bloodlettings in hotspots all over the world, pushing, pushing, pushing the edges of neo-imperialism in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, Africa, and (apparently) in the Americas as well. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, have paid for this neo-imperial expansionism with their lives and it looks like many, many more must do so before this phase is done.

What did we do to deserve this? "We" in the sense of the global non-elite, the ordinary people who seem to get blown up and blown away willy-nilly and who have little or no say in the march of this or any other empire.

It is not for us to say they tell us. Not for us to say.

As we get closer to the year's pivot, I become more and more apprehensive as there are so many potential explosion-points, far more than I can recall in any previous year. Many observers have seen parallels to the outbreak of World War I or the outbreak of World War II, and many have seen madness in the eyes of Our Leaders. They are careening out of control, and without some form of intervention, they will almost inevitably lead us into apocalypse and catastrophe. They seem to want it desperately.

The question is whether there can be an intervention before the end.

I don't know.

But I shudder to think where the madness is headed.