The New Dark Ages

We live in a most pivotal time.  As much as that may be so poignantly hard to believe as it is far too easy to get up in the morning, drive through relatively clean suburban neighborhoods to work, spend the day working with others who, through the very onerous task of maintaining the depersonalized world of business by eschewing human emotion, emphasizes a sense of stability. Only to drive back home through those same relatively clean suburban neighborhoods to eat dinner and watch television programming that makes real life seem so much simpler in some ways.  Rinse and repeat.   Yet, there are little seeds of discontinuity even within those relatively clean suburban neighborhoods.  The homes in need of paint, lawns slightly overgrown, the empty storefronts within the strip malls--all prickling away if one is attentive.  Each of these harbor untold, unshared stories of desperation.  What has happened to America whose ideals were once the white picket fence flanking a pristine yard and the well maintained home? 

Historians have the task of labeling the various time periods of human civilization through terms that adequately describe them.  The Golden Age, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, The Industrial Age.  If there is any term that I could say most adequately describes our own time period, it would be none other than the New Dark Ages.   Some may balk at such a comparison for certainly we have far greater technology and are far cleaner.  Our educational system is still providing learning for the masses and the average way of life is still a vast improvement from our prior Dark Age counterparts.  Yet, that would also be turning a blind eye on those seeds of discontinuity buried within our own seemingly pristine world.   We need to recollect the very basic idea of cause and effect.  For every thing that occurs, there will be a resultant effect.  Nothing lives within an isolated bubble.  Quite the opposite, we, along with every other living creature on this planet, live in one bubble together.  The ramifications of changes within this bubble will be felt throughout.  So as more and more find it increasingly difficult to obtain adequate health care, then so will disease increase.  Already, diseases once thought abolished through vaccinations have been rearing their ugly heads as parents with little choice but to continuously cut corners, choose to put food on their table over vaccinating their children.  A very poignant example of cause and effect. 

The Dark Ages, however, are not defined as simply being a very dirty, disease ridden time. On the contrary, the Dark Ages were dark because human beings lost any form of enlightenment.  Dark is the absence of light.  The Dark Ages were a time where the masses were left uneducated and where feudalistic structures stratified and removed all hope of opportunity to surpass the economic and social status of one's ancestors.  A time period where the mass of human populous, with little doubt, had no choice but to be subservient to their masters whether through inducement of poverty, stripping of land ownership, and even life, itself and could not believe in anything otherwise for to oppose such forces most certainly meant death or incarceration.   Intellectualism and the sciences were shunned and deemed heretical while religion fleeced out promises that, at the end of it all, the meek shall inherit the earth.  Yet one has to ask whether God would smile upon those who allow themselves to grovel in the dirt over utilizing the very gifts that God so purportedly gave to them to shine?  If I were to point to the greatest source of deprivation for the masses in the Dark Ages, I would say that it was that human beings were deprived of the one thing that normally would drive them to improve to their fullest potential--self interest.

We are in the New Dark Ages indeed despite our cleanliness and education because that is precisely what has been stripped of the human masses.  We have lost our self interest to survive, to seek better for ourselves, and shine.  How different from the Dark Age world is Greece?  Spain? Or even the United States?  I have found it so baffling to see so many willfully strip away their and others human rights of choice, liberty, and opportunity for prosperity through a sense of self-interest that is no different than the farmer willfully giving away most of his crop to protect what little livelihood he could maintain.   We live in a time where science again is regarded as heresy and where a man making less than $30,000 a year will vociferously and sacrificially defend a man making over 30,000 times more.  Where has self interest or even the concept that we, as communal beings, benefit when our communities thrive gone?  Humanity is no less indoctrinated in belief systems that, either through gentle persuasion, irrationality or brute force, enforce subservience.   To say that this is unacceptable is not to condone revolution for the only revolution that can possibly hold any hope for humanity as a whole is not one filled with blood but a revolution in thinking.  We need another Renaissance.  Yet, is it any mistake that even those who may recognize this so perversely blame the root of it as being the Illuminati, the very name of the group of scientists and philosophers who strove to rekindle enlightenment in humanity so long ago?   We need to recall that it is not a matter of whether we deserve better but to recall that we can do better for ourselves and for our children.  That to shine, to be a light is what illuminates and enlightens us all.