Cohen on the Future

What did he see?

I think Leonard Cohen got it right when he said that the modern world is in the middle of a spiritual catastrophe.

I think he was right to say that the essence of that catastrophe is a lack or a failure of love.

And I think he believed, and I think he was right, that the most troubling and evident example of that absence of love is abortion.

“Destroy another foetus now

We don’t like children anyhow.”

In this regard, things are rapidly getting worse. We are everywhere dissolving into warring factions, with few or no bonds of common morality or common civility left.

Perhaps Cohen was ready to die when he did die, as he said he was, because he did not want to see what was coming. Many, including his son, thought it was significant that he died on the very eve of Trump’s election as US President. (This does not mean that the problem is Trump; it could as well mean Trump is a symptom and result of the problem. Indeed, it must, since Cohen clearly believed the problem long preceded Trump. And it might be the inevitable reaction to his election, as much as or more than the election itself, that was his concern.)

“I’ve seen the future, brother.

It is murder.”

Glenn Beck recently publicly said he instinctively or intuitively expects some great general war within the next few years.

Some say Beck is inclined to be alarmist. Kind of like spiritual click-bait. That may be so.

I have been inclined to be more optimistic, to feel that the forces of hate had by now become so blatant and blatantly wrong that there would be a natural and general pulling back to morality. That their very virulence suggested they were becoming desperate.

But then, I’ve thought that since the early Seventies. So far, I have been wrong.

Perhaps Beck and Cohen are right. Desperate hate may well take down everyone and everything possible before allowing its own defeat. It will go, but it may well not go quietly.