Phil Rockstroh: Contemplating the Abyss
from Consortium News:
Contemplating the Abyss
May 18, 2012
The urgent question facing the planet is whether todays late-capitalist era, possessed of unbridled greed at the top, can be turned to meet the needs of the worlds people or will hurtle onward to a global abyss, disrupting age-old patterns of life and bringing mass destruction, a crisis pondered by Phil Rockstroh.
By Phil Rockstroh
On May 1, after a day of May Day activities on the streets and avenues of Manhattan, my wife and I and a troop of other OWS celebrants marched into Zuccotti Park to jubilant exhortations of welcome home from a throng of fellow occupiers. The next day, my wife and I boarded a southbound Amtrak train to join family gathered at my dying fathers bedside to bid him farewell.
May in Georgia
In this age of climate chaos, the local flora comes to bloom a full month earlier than in decades past. This season, magnolias and hydrangeas blossomed in early May. Their petals opened to the world as my fathers life is fading. The magnolia petals have grown heavy; his body is shrinking. Soon he will drift from this world
carried by the scent of late spring blossoms.
In our once laboring class neighborhood, McMansions blot out the late spring sun. In the arrogant shadow of these shoddily constructed, bloated emblems of late capitalism, the neighborhoods remaining 1950′s single level, brick homes seem to recede
fading like memory before the hurtling indifference of passing eras.
In late spring, veils of pollen merge with shrouds of Atlanta traffic exhaust. Timeless nature has awakened as the noxious capitalist certainties underpinning the aberration known as the New South are dying. .....................(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://consortiumnews.com/2012/05/18/contemplating-the-abyss/