A thought for the year ahead...

We are poised on the brink of a major change in government.

Our leaders currently in power are entertaining themselves with clowns on our dollar and standing to applaud our enemies at the heart of our Republic while the troubles of our country go unaddressed; our leaders poised to resume power, by our sweat and sacrifice, seem uncertain whether they want to behave any differently, or instead spend their resources taking care of their dwindling circle of peers at the expense of the people.

Our wounded and weakened, ignorant, vain, insular, narcissistic and unready President faces a year without the support of his party, an agenda at odds with both reality and the needs of his country, and no tactic to deal with it save reinforcing failure.

Our intellectual and artistic icons are digging themselves deeper into a more extreme and irrelevant ideological pit, becoming shriller and angrier as they realize the mudfooted commoners are not only no longer listening, but mocking them, and finding other voices both new and old to listen to.

Factions and groups that have grown rich at our expense refuse to realize the purse is empty, and demand that last penny that has to be in there somewhere.

And all the while our country's wounds, self-inflicted and inflicted by others, lay open.

It's going to be an interesting year.  It will probably, a lot of the time, be a scary and ugly one.

So I offer a thought, from a man who had seen times even worse than these:

Give me, my God, what you still have;

give me what no one asks for,

I do not ask for wealth, nor success,

nor even health.

People ask you so often, God, for all that,

that you cannot have any left.

Give me, my God, what you still have.

Give me what people refuse to accept from you.

I want insecurity and disquietude;

I want turmoil and brawl.

And if you should give them to me,

my God, once and for all, 

let me be sure to have them always,

for I will not always 

have the courage to ask for them.

Corporal Zirnheld

Special Air Service 

1942