More prophecy from Bob back in the sixties, from All Along the Watchtower. Written just 20 or so years after the end of World War 2 and heard by a generation who had been born after all the carnage of the first half of the 20th century including the horrific end culminating in the two WMD’s, atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now there’s a thing we hadn’t got before and we only invented the name for them when we “needed” to invade Iraq. We had created weapons of mass destruction.
So we needed a jolt, a flash of inspiration, something to remind us of our common humanity. Along comes the swinging sixties, suddenly there was colour, there was a sense of freedom awakening, some great music and the inventions, organic and otherwise, to make it sound better. There was the “Love and Peace” movement, the anti Vietnam war movement, the anti establishment movement. It didn’t take too long for it to get squashed, for the “establishment” to regain control over the direction we were being forced to follow. As a matter of fact it was engineered by a think tank that by pursuing market capitalism great wealth could be generated, for the few in control. We were sold shares in telecoms, and building societies became PLC’s and privatisation was the way forward. Ownership of our houses, our own private real estate, became part of the reality, it fed the arrogance, the greed, the dark side of our existence here. The inequalities that came through from these seeds beggared belief, causing a virtual stampede towards that great “wealth”. Meanwhile the weaker , the poorer became more frail, more in need and more ignored. Homelessness, famine, disease became rampant, ignored by the “free” market capitalist ideals that were building walls of wealth protection around themselves. The planet was only here to be owned, to be exploited, to be deforested, to be polluted. The Arrogance of man was paramount and the consequences were ignored or not seen, definitely not cared about.
Then along comes a virus. “Two riders were approaching, and the wind began to howl”. Maybe there were 4, and there is a great reckoning happening. There is some way out of here. There is a Great Good inside our Humanity. This is the next phase of the Renaissance of the Good the Beautiful, the Wise.