Coming Apart at the Seams

Today, during the process of getting my daily dose of stomach acid reading about Turkey, I came across an article about Brazil.  I suppose the news service I use just decided to lump all the protests together.  The whole damn world is falling apart and the governments thereof are sitting in a corner covering their eyes and ears and pretending it's all okay.

I was in Brazil last summer at this very time.  It is surreal for me to think back over the oddly empty and quiet government buildings that we toured in Brasilia as now being the center of a protest movement.  I look at the pictures of the senate building, all clean lines and Niemeyer angles, and I'm trying to imagine that people overran it and are standing on top of it, that the government ran away.  It's either pure insanity or the beginning of hope.  God knows I'm not wise enough to know which.  Maybe it's both.  Maybe change is made of both.

Some of the protests that have happened lately are very specific.  People have a clear message for their government.  You're spending too much of our money.  You're stealing a bunch of our resources and running away.  You're sticking your fingers into our privacy, our choices.   You're destroying our freedom. We don't like it.  You should quit.

Some of them are not.  People are just generally pissed and gathered.  There is an unnamed sense of unhappiness that spreads or a small thing that touches off a deep-seated pocket of explosive issues.

What's happening to us all?  I used to think that it was just our government here in the States that was fairly out of touch with its constituents.  We always have some scandal or ridiculous sneaky crap going on.  If the people running our nation used half as much passionate ingenuity in solving problems and bettering their country as they do trying to line their own pockets, accrue power, clandestinely pursue illegal activities, and sink the "other guy," we'd probably all live in solid-platinum houses on Mars.  (I'm just saying.)   It's probably been that way since 1776.  Maybe there were times when it abated, but maybe it's always there when governments are more worried about their own power than they are about the good of the people they represent.  Right now seems to be one of those moments where everyone everywhere is just tired of it.

What will happen to us all?  What's coming next?  As always, that old Yeats poem is sneaking around in the back of my head.  Clearly, the center is not holding.  What now?  I'm afraid we are living in what that ancient Chinese proverb calls "interesting times," and you know all about that.....