My son was born last Saturday at 1:45 p.m. He's perfectly healthy. He has all the right parts in all the right places. He's sleeping in my lap under my keyboard right now. Since about five minutes after he was born, I've been thinking I owe him an apology. You see, he has come into a world that is very difficult to explain to a child. Some of you may share this feeling.
It's not just that I can't explain to him the purpose of life, the problem of good and evil, or why I just love him so much already. It's that I can't explain to him what his future holds because his world is not going in the right direction at the moment, and the most recent moment where we thought we may have corrected that is quickly turning out to be a total illusion.
Some generations build great monuments. Some walk in their ruins, going about their business hardly taking notice of the weeds overgrowing them. Sometimes in history, these generations are next to each other. I think of the generation of the Tannaim in Ancient Judaea. One day, their temple stood. One day, it was destroyed. Or the generation who lived among the hustle and bustle of the Roman empire, and a generation that came shortly after them that lived in mostly empty cities.
continued at Daily Kos....
