Dark is rising

Beauty like this blaze of color at Fort Tryon's Heather Garden yesterday - they manage extravagances of bloom when everyone else has given up for the year - adds poignancy to dark feelings I've been trying to find a way to articulate. These have much to do, of course, with worry about the upcoming midterm elections, where people who don't believe in elections may be elected (and will in any case claim to be), but the dejection is broader. It's connected to Russia's deranged crusade in Ukraine and the Stalinism strangling China, and barely leavened by Schadenfreude at the antics of Little Britain. But what to say? What seemed to be one world, or a world progressively becoming one, seems to be ending. And everywhere there are people trapped, voiceless, with no say in the divisive schemes of their rulers. (That these sometimes have majority support doesn't make it better!) The dream that all people should have a say in how they live their lives seems almost fanciful, even without its cosmopolitan complement, but what other dream is worth having?