"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
Those lines from Yeats' poem, The Second Coming, have fascinated me ever since I first discovered them a good many years ago. About the only "pleasure" I derive from them is that the words are so true and so concisely put; they afford the same kind of enjoyment that I get from Shakespeare's aphorisms although so many of those lines are about sadness and suffering and it is a "sadder but wiser" person who nods at their truthfulness.
Contemplating "the best" and "the worst" right now in American life, I see the passionate intensity with which the worst, the so-called lawmakers, have fought reform of any kind because those lawmakers represent the interests of those mighty few who have so much, against those many who have so little -- the ones Jesus stated clearly were "the best." (He actually called them "the least" of his children, saying that whatever wrong we did to them we did to him and whatever compassion we gave to them we gave to him.)
I see the passionate intensity with which the worst, the rabble-rousers, the ones with guns and bricks and foul mouths and nasty tempers, full of hatred and envy and self-loathing, turned outward to dangerous other-loathing, on the verge of mob rule and insurrection call names and try to threaten and intimidate innocent people who "work hard and play by the rules."
Do we who see the injustice and understand that it is unjust by any standard of decency on this God's earth -- do we lack conviction? Can we muster the passion to fight this oligarchy and mob rule we're faced with? Do the best lack all conviction?
