The scenario:
UnBalancer sweeps the globe.
It begins in the wild, unbalancing a tiny creature that’s captured, taken to a live market in China, and slaughtered. From one vendor’s cart, it scurries around the market, dividing rapidly, like tiny UnBalancer rats and fleas.
Buyers, unaware, take it home and UnBalancer enslaves them to its will. Swiftly and relentlessly, UnBalancer spreads.
Throughout the world it appears, emulating scenes from scary movies and silly pop songs from the 50s and 60s. The sky fills with flying monkey Unbalancers reminiscent of the Wizard of Oz.
Giant purple UnBalancers descend on our cities like the Eggplant that Ate Chicago, and gargantuan scaly UnBalancers ascend from the depths of the ocean like Godzilla.
Insidiously they spread, transforming us into UnBalancers in human guise, who then set about infecting others as they sleep, like the unbalancing aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
UnBalancer Gremlins and Critters creep through our streets and into our households, consuming everything in sight, paralyzing our economies.
UnBalancers rise from the graves and scatter through the countryside, converting our organs to their own dastardly needs.
In a scenario not even the most prescient science fiction writer could have imagined, an orange-skinned UnBalancer with a bad toupee occupies the White House, throwing temper tantrums that propagate like UnBalancer aerosols to all parts of the Nation and beyond, all the while assuring us that everything’s fine.
Anyone can be an UnBalancer.
Neighbors are pitted against neighbors, fighting for toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and hair dye.
UnBalancer’s slaves protest at state capitols, brandishing semi-automatic weapons, the master UnBalancer’s minions Fear and Greed riding on their backs, pulling the reins, directing them toward chaos.
It’s an UnBalancer attack like none we’ve seen before, seemingly without end.
As individuals, as nations, and as a species, we feel powerless in face of this attack, Balancers from the personal to the global capitulating to what seems to be an inexorable unbalancing force.
As the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats observed a century ago, in the wake of the first World War and the Spanish Flu pandemic:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
This is the world we find ourselves in today.
Question: What can we do to get back to Balance?
To be continued….
See you in cyberspace –
David
Copyright 2020, David J. Bookbinder
Transformations Press
Nonfiction by David J. Bookbinder
The Art of Balance: Staying Sane in an Insane World on Amazon.com
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Paths to Wholeness: Fifty-Two Flower Mandalas
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We need Part 2!
Working on it!
Terrific. Your text and the Yeats poem, the best apocalyptic poem there is. The other Ur-text is the Grand Inquisitor’s indictment of Jesus in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. To oversimplify: humans hate freedom. They crave authority and bread. Same thing today. Never mind that our authority is a clown. And bread is not enough. We must have haircuts and massages.
I have to wonder, this time around, “what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
Still, according to the Hindu religion, we are only in the middle of the Kali Yuga. And as my friend Richard used to say, “there’s always hope where there’s water and soap.”