I’m not going to say this is worse than before, that the situation now is more dire, people are more foolish, things are bleaker.

They aren’t. The News and those shitheads in the media want you to think that. They want you to believe you are in a worse time, you aren’t. It is bad but bad has been the norm for a long time. Only periodically is there a brightness.

These times are not worse, they’re the same. There is too little historical perspective and the fools have been propagandized into believing that they are “special,” smarter, the “flower of humanity.”

You aren’t. You are just here, no more worthy or better than the citizen walking in the agora, a visitor to Delphi, a hoplite or a rower in a trireme. You have to do something to be special. It is not a gift of birth. The struggle between right and wrong, good and evil existed, did exist and still exists.

Trees grow, they die, and fall. New trees grow…..Things repeat and repetition is positive, it is how you learn, how the ILIAD was passed on as an oral performance of poetry which inspires millions. But Trees grow and die, that’s what happens. As one of my teachers said on his deathbed; “People die.”

Read something edifying and learn a little. Look back as well as forward. Learn to pray.

People forget Philip of Macedon; and they aren’t too clear about his son either. Pericles? Solon, Lycurgus? Nah, nobody remembers and the only things they do glom onto popular culture but that fades too, Lysander? Harry Lauder, Nat Hiken, Phil Silvers? Are these 2^nd tier talents? Maybe, (but they’re better than they are!) and there was a day when they were first! And even those that fade least, (Aeschylus, Chaplin, and Lucille Ball) are just names….. their actions are barely remembered…

So this is how it is. Live with it. Look for the moments, the seconds where joy is there, pride and Glory in your work, in your children, in your grandchildren and your daily life. These are brief flashes, seconds, but they’re wonderful. There’s a belief that when you die your life flashes before you. It may be pretty easily done for the wonderful seconds happen in the blink of an eye.  That’s what we work for, that moment of Glory.

“Glory is fleeting but obscurity is forever.”