rumblings on a sunday night

A sadness, a desperation seems to hang
in
the air.
Hope wanes. Again.
Unemployment. Debt.
Poverty. Starvation.
War. Terror.
Spin. Fib. Outright
deceit. But there is a civility
to all of that, now, unlike
the 60s, as if no one is really willing
to get
his or her
hands dirty. The
Weathermen weren’t afraid.
The Panthers.
The SDS.
Best, yet, ordinary citizens did something. Young
people.
But, now, either we’ve
learned from those acts of the passed, or
we’ve forgotten them.
(Or, ever worse, never’d learned
of them.)
Every now and then
I joke that the revolution
is coming.
But I don’t think it is.
I don’t think we
have
it
in
us. And maybe
that’s the saddest thing
of
all, because it’s not the end of
an empire,
it’s the passing of a spirit.