Watching the installation speech of US
elected president.
I have seen those faces before in old
black and white films from Central Europe during the mid 1930s. The vacant,
shallow expressions of those under the evil spell of kleptocrats and
megalomaniacs. But now, nearly 90 years later, we face an overwhelmingly more
populated planet teetering on the brink of a sixth mass extinction, a looming
climate catastrophe that our children will inherit together with weapons of
mass destruction in the hands of madness.
Even in my distant country, some of the
media seems paralyzed by fear almost unwilling to pull back the curtain and
tell the truth. There is a pervasive admiration for power, a weakness
masquerading as deference. To top it off, invoking religion by quoting Martin
Luther King feels like the final insult, a hollow gesture that completes the
defeat.
All of this unfolds before my eyes, in
real time, during my own era.
Pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust,
gluttony, and sloth on full display.