In The Winter Of My Age

On Growing Old

What is it to grow old?
Is it to lose the glory of the form,
The lustre of the eye?
Is it for beauty to forego her wreath?
Yes, but not for this alone.
Is it to feel our strength
Not our bloom only,
but our strength decay?
Is it to feel each limb
Grow stiffer, every function less exact,
Each nerve more weakly strung?
Yes, this, and more! but not,
Ah, 'tis not what in youth we dreamed 'twould be!
Tis not to have our life mellowed and softened
as with sunset-glow,
A golden day's decline!
Tis not to see the world
As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,
And heart profoundly stirred;
And weep, and feel the fulness of the past,
The years that are no more!
It is to spend long days
And not once feel that we were ever young.
It is to add, immured
In the hot prison of the present, month
To month with weary pain.
It is to suffer this,
And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel:
Deep in our hidden heart
Festers the dull remembrance of a change,
But no emotion none.
It is last stage of all
When we are frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves,
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man.

--Matthew Arnold

THE GRAND CONSPIRACY

Yesterday, the Associated Press reported that Wells Fargo Bank was throwing a shindig for its most "talented" employees. This soiree is to be staged at the Wynn Hotel (Las Vegas' most expensive lodging); and it is to occur over 12 days time. Now, in case you might have missed the news, Wells Fargo was deemed a failed bank by Congress, and presented with a 25 billion dollar gift by the U.S. Treasury. All part of the bail out or fail mentality rife inside the Beltway.

A spokeswoman for Wells Fargo replied to the incredulity expressed by the press, that this par-tay was in keeping with the banks "corporate culture".

I don't know about you, but this arrogance and financial misappropriation, kind of reminds me of the mindset of the french aristocracy on the eve of The Revolution. And it reminds me too of the great ballroom scene Edgar Allen Poe created in his Masque Of The Red Death. Its' simply a large caste of people believing they are divinely annointed to rape the land and its' inhabitants for their own personal gain.

I believe that the actions of the dumb and lunatic in Congress; and in the international banking community, will bring us to a point where civil unrest and civil disobedience will bring this republic to ruin.

And I believe this destruction will occur in my lifetime. That saddens me because I love my country.