Anthem

The thing that is most on my mind, most of the time as well as this Christmas morning in 2012, is the reality of young people's having to face the horror and to figure out what to make of it.

The best hope concerning it that I can draw from this last, passing, year may seem to come through very small cracks, but that's how the light gets in, as Leonard Cohen's Anthem puts it:

The crack from this last year that lets the most promise in for me has to be Eben Alexander's simple but profound portrayal of our independence of the brain/body, that we are spiritual beings having an earthly experience rather than earthly beings having a spiritual experience.

My own earthly experience continues, longer than I expected, and I see the depth and extent of the horror more than ever. The latest glimpse was from reading a new book on deception, trivialization and manipulation on the Internet by Ryan Holiday, Trust Me I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator. He quotes a major Gawker blogger's complaint:

Fake news. I don't mean fake news in the Fox News sense. I mean the fake news that clogs up most newspapers and most news websites, for that matter. The new initiative will go nowhere. The new policy isn't new at all.... The product isn't revolutionary. And journalists pretend that these official statements and company press releases actually constitute news....Fake news, manufactured, hyped, rehashed, retracted – until at the end of the week you know no more than at the beginning.

The repentant Ryan says of this: “It is like Kim Kardashian complaining how fake reality TV shows are.”

The crack through which light comes in to me is sometimes something seemingly small like Alexander's book. Another that comes to my mind right now from a few years ago was waking up one cold, gray, lonely, rainy morning in my truck at some muddy, forsaken, filthy truck-stop in Texas. Rivulets of rain were running down the windshield, but – there was some early morning light refracting through the streams and droplets on the glass into countless, sharp, sparkling colors. I remember seeing such refractions through dewdrops like millions of diamonds in the grass around my home in New Hampshire after the loss of a loved one. I've seen even more colors than these in the eyes of a loved one.

That's how the light gets in for me despite my deepening awareness of the horror and darkness. And what comes to me as the large picture is that the horror is necessary in order that we see through it and come out the other side of it, so that we will then be able to appreciate what we necessarily could not have appreciated before, because we necessarily would not have been able to know the difference.

I think it's like the necessity of knowing an other language in order to understand and appreciate your own language, or like the necessity of taking the viewpoints of others in order to be able to know your self.