Plague Journal (Children of the Last Days)

by Michael D. O'Brien

People don’t listen much to angry men who vent their anger. By contrast, an angry man who controls his rage and forges it into cool thought is an estimable force in society.

Huxley maintained that, in the future, democracy and freedom would be the subject of every broadcast and editorial, but the underlying substance would be a seemingly benign totalitarianism. It has been pointed out by a few sane men that this kind of totalitarianism is the worst of all, the most inhumane, impossible to throw off because it can always argue that it’s not in fact what it is.”

the plan that’s going to reshape the world in a few years from now. Most of the world’s poverty is caused by imbalances in the global economic systems.

The difference between your experts and our experts is that yours want to save collective humanity, and ours want to save each human being.

You’d turn them into a number in a computer bank—for their own good, of course. We want to restore your so-called masses to a sense of their individual personhood. That’s the only way a real community, a real nation, and a sane world come about. By freeing people to be what they truly are, one by one, person by person.”

Democracies in decline, however, will revert to covert oppression and the overt gradual erosion of human rights.

Why is it so difficult to believe that the worst is happening? You who believe in progress? Look at the marvellous whisper-jets in our skies. But they are flown by a police force that isn’t accountable to you or me. You believe in the elimination of poverty. Look at the efficient way the computers are planning a world economy, how they will number us, and we shall be made content, lacking nothing. Look at the ways they are eliminating the poor themselves by burning them to death with saline and cutting them to pieces in the womb. Talk about woks! A very strange age, is it not? But you experience it as normal.

Dear Alice, what can I say? Here in the twentieth century we’re late, we’re late, for a very important date! Find us a man-size hole that we can leap down. Gimme a looking glass! Gimme a key! Tell me the way to Wonderland, or show me a way to flee!

Where has it all gone, I ask? Is it still there, just waiting to be found again? So many of us have been scattered. So many missing. Where is the birth and death we used to share? Why did we not understand what was happening when the family began to disintegrate? Why did we not resist it? Why did we not fight against the corruption of our culture? Why did we not pray as we ought? Did we defend the little ones from the ravages of wolves? And now, lo these many years later, do we any longer cherish the very old and the very sick? Do we tolerate the young in noisy, demanding numbers? Do we bear with dignity the pain of existence (and the beauty of it), or avoid it at any cost? Have we lost bit by bit our reverence for the mystery of a human life, losing in the process our ability to love the poor and the plain and the mad and the difficult-to-live-with, the enemies, the saints, and the sinners? Is it our own face we see reflected in the mirror of their eyes?

Children teach you most of the real lessons. That is, if you try to love them well. I don’t mean yuppie love, the squandering of fortunes on their quality environments and their quality toys and their quality relationships and their quality experiences.

I didn’t know it then, but the cost of a happy family is the death of selfishness. The father must die if he is to give life to his spouse and children. Not a pleasant thought but a true one. An entire lifetime can be spent avoiding it. It’s simply not enough to provide and protect. In themselves, of course, providing and protecting are good and necessary things. That is our responsibility. But a father can provide a mountain of material goods for his family and defend it against all kinds of inconveniences, thinking he can rest easy, having done his part, and still have missed the essential point: he is called to be an image of love and truth. The house he provides, be it a cabin, a mansion, or a barge painted Christmas colors, must have at its core a heart that is willing to look at its poverty. As long as we’re convinced of our own strengths, our cleverness, and our cagey ability to endure, we still think we’re in charge. We construct a life-style of eliminating difficulties at any cost. It takes a lot of padding if you’re to avoid the unexplainable, unjust blows of suffering. There will come a time, however, when this elaborate defense system crumbles.

When our other strengths fail, there at the base of our empty souls is a mysterious silent wealth. There at the bottom of the barrel is the real strength, not power or resources, not worldly wisdom or a solid defense system, but rather the will to continue to love and to live by the truth.