Sexuality, Feminism & the Coming Crunch

For those who watch these things, there seems to be emerging in feminist circles an increasingly intense conflict between sexual libertarians and those with a much broader gender based sexual-political agenda. The latter are insisting that narrowly sexistentialist (I am my sexuality) laissez-faireism (deregulated individual agency) has not been benign for women and the time is long overdue to not only put some boundaries around it, but properly address the political side of sexual politics

The more ‘political’ feminists are revisiting some of the early arguments between ‘progressives’ and ‘conservatives’, when the consumer/sexual 'revolution' was assembling itself in the fifties and sixties. But the revisit is not just a rehash so much as a critical re-assessment of what the victorious sexual libertarians have delivered, or haven't delivered over a protracted period, as a sub-component of consumer capitalism.

The debate goes to the heart of what progressive means, or for that matter conservative. The notion of restraint and boundaries used to be par excellence, an 'authoritarian', 'repressive' and 'conservative' position. But what is 'progress' if it turns out to be extremist, seedy, disempowering and nasty? What does it mean when sexual libertarian 'progressivism' becomes part of the equally libertarian and 'progressivist' established market order, and a pillar of the current status quo?

Is concern about porn and prostitution graduating from backyard 'trades' to substantial 'industries' a conservative reaction to unwarranted respectability and unwelcome growth, that leads to corrupt and unsustainable social practice and existential values? Or is it a radical critique of betrayal of what the feminist gender agenda could and should have been, and yet might be?

Both tendencies are at play. Perhaps it is measure of how confused and conflated political categories in late modern times are that the language of 'liberationist' political discourse is becoming opaque, unfamiliar and paradoxical.

The mantra that says if it feels good, it is good, is being met with conservative caution, regard for personal integrity and valuing the trust, respect and goodwill that underpins equitable, high standard, stable, secure and sustainable social outcomes, for the reproductive long haul. But this mingles with a vision to complete the task that was originally promised, to reconstruct the inequitably lopsided and dysfunctional place of women in the world at large, in the domestic business of producing the next generation and in the one-to-one partnering politics of women and men.

The politics of one side is subsumed in the dynamics of an extremist consumer agenda that wants to remove restraint and promote inconsequential openness to desire and gratifying it. The other wants stalled gender contract negotiations restarted in earnest. The two sides couldn't have less in common.

The feminist critics of the status quo are looking at things like the effect of porn on the children of the internet age, and suggesting that it is so ubiquitous and extremist in its content, it is starting to affect the sexual-political milieu in ways that are very adverse for women and girls. They are suggesting that the deregulated and legalized prostitution (sorry, ‘sex work’) trade/industry is every bit as nasty and bad for women and society at large as it was always represented to be; i.e., degrading, emotionally tough, health hazardous and sometimes dangerous work that leaves a lot of damage in its wake, even for the $5,000 dollar a night girls, let alone for those who do $70 quickies in the back of cars....and an irresistible magnet for money laundering, sex trafficking, drug distribution and the inevitable criminal elements that that attracts in its wake.

What is interesting to me about this are not so much the toing and froing of the argumentative traffic around analysis and evidence, so much that it is happening at all and that the libertarian laissez-faire progressives are on the defensive, because they are the ones with a record to defend. It used to be the traditional conservatives who had that problem. It is the libertarian progressives who are now being forced into the ‘reactionary’ conservative role of defending the status quo. The irony is that their feminist critics are at least in part bringing to the table a more disciplined temperamental conservatism that recognizes the false values that underpin the cult of indulgence. They can see how perversely it not only cuts off substantial change to the status of women, and the revisions of social practice that ought to be coming in its wake, but it has also given them some unpleasant dummy prizes that they could have easily done without.

These arguments that are presently going on in feminist circles (and their male supporters) would not be a problem for the libertarians if they were just about the impact of porn or the state of the prostitution industry. While they are not small issues, they are small enough to be contained and bunkered with ‘progressive’ counter research and analysis. Even the most adverse impacts can be minimized, fudged, obfuscated and blustered down enough to sow sufficient controversy to build doubt and blunt attack. The ground between cause and effect can be endlessly dissected, bent and blocked in detail.

Subjecting the sexual libertarians and their sexistentialist laissez-faire ideology to effective attack that will flush them down the toilet of history is going to be tough, because they are agents of consumer capitalism and it is not only enormously resilient and expert in the business of absorbing dissent, but creates an overwhelmingly totalitarian sense of business-as-usual.

The way broad based ‘progressivism’ destroyed the traditionalists’ sexual politic in the post World War and subsequent periods, when consumer capitalism was assembling itself, was a combined ideological front that established a broad ‘reasonable’ values consensus and libertarian ‘vision’ which was then able to disrupt traditionalist conservatism in detail. And the mechanisms involved not just taking over the ideological and intellectual ‘high ground’, but putting foot soldiers on it in strategic positions in the media, education, health, welfare, politics (institutional and lobbying) and the law.

The legacy of that can still be seen. When in 2011, Jeff Kennett, the CEO of 'Beyondblue' (a psychological depression support service) and the socially conservative ex premier of Victoria had the temerity to publicly suggest that marriage and parenting was exclusively a male and female partnering business, prominent health sector mouthpieces and homosexual lobbyists came at him from all directions. They accused him of worsening the condition of depressed homosexuals by further marginalizing their sexuality and sense of identity, and demanded he resign.

No one questioned the implied conflation of moral judgment, political agenda and health ‘science’. Nobody questioned ‘the authorities’ or how representative the mouthpieces really were, or wondered if this were a bit like the two year old child who gets ‘depressed and upset’ if it isn’t given a sweetie in the supermarket; especially one it would have regarded as a bourgeois sham a generation ago.

Of course it has a sacred right to a sweetie! It’s upset; the poor fragile little sausage.... Kennett was hung out to dry, and he was silenced. The fact that the intellectual tripe led against him was of the no-red-ink-corrections-on-student-work-by-teachers-because-it-undermines-their-confidence caliber, made no difference. And no one came to his defense, because we don’t support homophobes anymore, do we children? No Miss....

What the re-regulating radical feminists are up against is ideological infrastructure which is so entrenched, it can get away with this sort of precious infantile narcissism. And the clue as to how to deal with it is recognizing the point at which social laissez-faire libertarianism, which is the civil/non market arm of corporate indulgence capitalism, is becoming vulnerable to attacks on its legitimacy.


By 1517, the church of the late medieval world had been travelling badly for some considerable time. The discontent with this crystallized in an obscure German town in the equally obscure person of an academic cleric, called Martin Luther. This nobody put up his objections on the cathedral door of Wittenberg, to the very dubious practice of the church raising funds by selling indulgences, which allowed sinners to buy their way out of blocks of time in purgatory, after they had died, so that they could get into heaven and salvation quicker.

Anyone who had tried to object to Church malpractice or lead alternative theology in the previous millennium had either been forced to recant or ended up as toast. But Luther’s seemingly unlikely survival wasn’t just luck. At all levels of the society of his time, people were beset with doubts about the Church’s performance and relevance. He got immediate traction and political protection and was able to rapidly carve a swathe out of its following in Germany, with almost ridiculous ease.

We are reaching that point with our own version of the late medieval church; The Libertarchs; the laissez-faire libertarians...

But Luther got away with it not just because he pinpointed deficits in the status quo, because he also engineered a theological pathway that would establish a new institutional structure, with enough leverages on it to take on the old order, not just as a renegade, but an alternative to it.

Thus the greatest ideological upheaval in modern history was born, by taking an enormous risk, pinpointing discontent, offering a new vehicle to drive into the future and a vision of where it was going.

Going after the porn and prostitution by itself won’t make even a dent in the status quo. To break it, one has to join the dots that will create the big picture that can galvanize accumulated social disappointment and show the way forward. Porn and prostitution need to be seen not as isolated phenomena, but emblematic of the social trends of our times. To say that violent porn causes sexual violence is a bit like the roof purlins accusing the rafters of being rotten as the roof starts to sag, because the whole place has been eaten away by white ants. Addressing and fixing the structural issues that these ‘industries’ feed off is where we need to be paying attention.


And the way that is done is to show that we are not helpless to construct new social infrastructure out of the ruins left by a mass mobilized all out world war templated economic system, that not only vacuums out anything that does not service extremist forced march production and consumption goals, and carpet bombs civil populations with goods and services ordinance, but eviscerates its own wretched servants and institutions as well. They too are caught in a maelstrom of ever shorter cycles of 'productive destruction', ever more intensive competition and relentlessly brutal productivity requirements that make Mao's Revolutionary Great Leap Forward look tame. That was a grim time, but they didn't need suicide nets on the upper storeys of factory blocks in those days.

Mao tried to break up family life and take the children. He failed because the attempt was clumsy. Consumer capital and its social libertarian acolytes have succeeded and made it inter-generational. Parents have been turned into impotent and mystified dorkasaurs who unaccountably have no clout or credibility. They are reduced to servants whose only job is to provide the snacks, toys, transport and entertainment. Their children magically acquired human rights freebies, which they naturally enforce. They only listen to the sponsors, the opinion makers 'who know' and the Pied Pipers of Cool, who take them into the magic mountain of permanent adolescence, to possibly grow old, but never grow up….

And it looked so normal, natural, inevitable, right and unquestionable. It seemed to self assemble, all by itself, right under the collective noses and hardly anyone even suspected that they had been done like a dog's dinner. And we all clap and nod our heads, because who wants to be against self evidently progressive ’change’, except people who need to be called nasty names, because they are in league with reactionary dark forces, aren’t they children? Yes Miss.

The twenty-first century radical visionary isn't going to be 'revolutionary' so much as reconnecting with the basics that keep people and communities in high functioning and good working order, without the production, wealth distribution and social extremism of a society that just can’t help raping everything it touches; the planet, human social software and its existential commons.

The corporates and their little libertarian helpers are the revolutionaries. We on the other side just want our lives and our families back, some semblance of decent governance to make that possible and a future that doesn’t look like it is going to crash and burn on all fronts.

We can organize, regulate, performance benchmark, audit and enforce new social and existential templates. We can reconstruct our social commons, rebuild its capital and balance sheets, have some hope of working to undo and repair past damage, and permanently improve inter-generational outcomes across the board.

And this isn't about radical egalitarianism, so much as distrust of unnecessarily extreme asymmetries, because they reduces the talent pool, skew participation, lessen goodwill, security and stability, and at the extreme margins, produce poor human capital from either want, or indulgence, or damn-your-neighbor values. That isn't radical. That is a conservative view driven by the need for stability and some certainty in the basics of life, in a very uncertain, unstable and pathologically irrational world order.

This is no more than setting for our social milieu the same uncompromising and consistent product standards and regulatory environment that we have come to expect from ordinary industrial production. We wouldn’t dream of tolerating the kinds of practices and outcomes in say the production of cars that we do in the presently deregulated and privatized social commons. And the social commons supports an industry that produces the most precious product we make; our children!

If our social infrastructure were a monetized industry, it would be charged with trading while insolvent and producing negligently designed, poorly made, unreliable, breakdown prone and unsafe product that is as much a hazard to itself as those who have to interact with it.

It seems to me that porn and prostitution business empires represent interconnected symptoms of a larger collapse of governance. Consumer capitalism has generated a sexual revolution which rather than liberating, became a tool of totalitarian control. Women weren't liberated. They were screwed literally and metaphorically. It doubled their work load by adding paid workforce employment on top of their domestic industry responsibilities, kept them underpaid and under-promoted, forced them into sex-on-demand, commodified and dehumanized their sexuality and exploited it relentlessly as an industrial icon of desire and gratification.

And that is counted as being 'liberated'. What?

We don't have to go to the porn and prostitution rackets to see the deal the sexual libertarians have delivered to women. They are just the tip of a great big shitty iceberg….

The consumer society has reduced existential and social software to trash that then leaks pathological behavior in an increasingly uncontrolled fashion, as society systematically destroys and discredits all forms of self control that might limit the consumption of goods and services, the pleasure principle that drives it and the inconsequential egoism that underpins it.

The modern totalitarian template is consummately skilled at producing very narrowly defined production drone software, which I characterize as production drivers (for motivating high productivity effort in making products and services) and consumer responders for fast response shop troops who just want their buttons pressed (buttons that connect to fantasies that trigger buying responses). Anything that does not fit into that architecture is residualized and destroyed, which means that human character development becomes grossly narrowed to the point of semi-functional chaos; like a beautiful old house where most of the structure, except for the facade and front rooms, is in ruins.

The city of the imagination in the first world is a bit like the slums of the third. Only the location of the impoverishment is different!

The problem with this social/economic model is that like all totalitarian systems, it just doesn't know when or how to stop, even if it could. And the skewing and radical narrowing of human software becomes so extreme, humans become defined by existential fragility in a world where the rules and boundaries are disappearing faster than white rhino. And the integrity effects of that are just as dire, whether one is talking corporate boardrooms or the mean streets; i.e., people who have lost compass regardless of wealth, power or social status, and who can no longer be relied upon to hold up the structures they responsible for, at any level, even if it is only themselves.

The GFC and its aftermath brutally brought to the fore what a moral vacuum looks like, when whole societies get trapped into a cycle of greed and irresponsible behavior that is so intense it turns into cannibalism, whether we are talking hedge funds, bank boards, space cadet mortgage borrowers, credit card credit card repayers or looters in working class districts of London.

On the other hand, from the management control perspective, the greater the chaos and impoverishment, the better it is, because the poor at heart are so famished and deprived of real existential nourishment, they will buy absolutely anything, even if the time and effort to make it ruins them, their family life and destroys the planet they live on.

Human rights, the once glowing liberal cultural artifact has shared the fate of its sponsors. Just as the corporate cousins have become too powerful to be held accountable or sufficiently responsible to pay tax, the Libertarchs have quietly removed the ongoing training, responsibility and obligation underpins that make sense of those rights. They delivered all the benefits but ‘forgot’ the disciplines. So rights gradually morphed into indulgence that turned liberty into licence; the latter being very different creatures from the originals. They do not empower; quite the opposite.

Giving children unconditional rights without training them in their obligations to others and the common weal isn’t just asking for trouble, it actually destroys the supposed beneficiaries by taking away responsible agency and inhibits their growth into mature adults. That has played straight into the hands of the corporates, whose marketers have made sure that the customers are always right and can be indulged and spoiled brats as much as they like, as long as they keep paying their credit cards at 20% interest.

Only in a totalitarian society that had been inured to irrational extremism could possible imagine that the Spoilt Little Adolescent Prince/Princess Syndrome (SPLATS) was normal, lifelong and OK. But we all nodded our heads and acquiesced to this absurd bluff because we don’t want to be ‘judgmental’ ‘stereotypers’, do we children? No Miss...

Nobody necessarily plans to do this in any centralized fashion. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, nobody had voted to murder every Jew in Europe. Not even the Nazis had a clear picture of how exactly they were going to solve the Jewish 'problem'. The 'final solution' evolved. It has been thus with the consumer libertarian 'revolution'.

When the British legal system decriminalized homosexual relations, no one had any idea that that would lead to homosexual couples getting married, having children, beating genuinely reproductively damaged couples to scarce adoption opportunities, starting to cause gender identity/sexual preference uncertainty among the young and the vulnerable, and branding objectors to this as ‘prejudiced’ ‘bigots’ with an impressively ancient Greek pseudo-psychiatric 'phobic' disorder.

And the thing is, if they were living alongside a reproductive commons that wasn’t on its knees, as a result of being continually slammed and undermined over a sixty to seventy year period by consumer/sexual revolutionaries, it would not even occur to them to try it on. They would have sufficient respect and circumspection to maintain the goodwill of a stable mainstream society which is in the business, as far as it reasonably can, of ensuring its children go forward into not just good quality and equitable adult relationships, but ones that truly reflect the politics and behavioral templates implied in the act of creating life. It will expect that those will be accurately reproduced through an entire generational cycle that will be mentored by the parties to that act of creation and those genetically closely connected to them. And it will make sure that all the necessary training, support and reproductive ‘industry’ regulatory standards and auditing are in place to make that happen as reliably as possible, because it really doesn’t like administrative, production and product failures.

And while such a society might be benignly tolerant of its inevitable sexual misprints; you know, nappy wearers, foot fetishists, underwear sniffers, bestials, sado-masochists, homosexuals, and all the other genetic and/or behavioral off message errors we are all capable of, the mainstream will be quite clear what its social/sexual base lines are. It won’t indulge people and will be completely immune to the bluff, crib, fudge, bigoted negative stereotyping, fanciful status equivalencing, arrogant judgmentality and puffed up prejudices of its libertarian enemies.

It too will be circumspect and respectful with its sexual outsiders, but will expect that in return; i.e., mutual non interference. And it won’t be very forgiving if that is not delivered in the same spirit.

Those are the basics; our roots; the absolute fundamental bottom lines of our species. Anything else is just colour and movement caused by the disorders and instability of a thoroughly trashed and confused society that can be preyed upon by any smart and aggressive opportunist with an axe to grind, and a plan. When we get to see the emergence of communities that have managed to get their eye in and their dentures back, that will stop. And when consumer capital starts to go the way of the dinosaurs, that agenda will be on in earnest, and the opportunists of another age will start to find just how thin the ice on which they walked really was.

It doesn’t matter whether it is the climate change denialists, Zionists, Christian Creationists, the US National Rifle Association or the homosexual lobby, they all identify their sectional interests with virtue and righteousness and their enemies with the forces of darkness, and boast a political language replete with all the appropriate keyword cliches and slogans necessary for successful mass marketed ideological warfare; warfare in which faith becomes blind and reason a harlot.

The revolutionary neo-conservative corporate libertarian de-regulators of consumer capital and their quarrelsome ideological cousins, the orthodox neo-liberal ascendancy (The Libertarchs) have worked in hostile tandem (They quarrel just like the twin bastions of the medieval world; the Church and Crown) to undermine not just traditional, but any social governance, moral commons or restraint, brick by brick, decade by decade, generation by generation, until it was a ruinous majoritarian fait accompli. And what opposition is left is all but destroyed and too defeated to make more than a whimper, or muttered resentment.

The only social management mechanisms now left are those of the marketers, the fantasy lures of consumer entitlement and the conflation of commercial and civil thought, such that the customer and citizen become one and the same. And the democratic features that come with the system shroud the most successful and invisible totalitarian control ever devised. Police states are obsolescent models now on the second hand market, for those who can’t afford the newest and by far the best social control products and services money can buy.


In the base of our skulls is the medulla. It is our original brain that shares the same features as that of a crocodile. It controls all the most deeply motivating and powerful hormonal juices are body makes. The cerebral cortex came much later, and all it has in its armamentarium is consequential reasoning.

The 'beast in the basement' is a beautiful and heavily muscled creature that is only semi-domesticable. The creature can affect very nice manners and speak in honeyed tones, but one has to be very careful with it, because it can quickly go from calm, albeit egocentric rationalization, to overwrought urgency, to angrily rattling its cage, to smashing it open and overwhelming its owner and the unfortunates around him, or her.

The apologists for the sexual revolution were very careful not to mention that. All we got to hear about were the fun bits. And our wretched women folk became the fun bits; on tap flesh for first date gimmes because if you don't baby, someone else will….You would think that such social practice would put prostitutes out of business, but apparently not. And the stupid girls even pay for their own dinner, because they are 'equals' now...but not in a game of their own making.

If 'The Beast' senses weakness in its keeper, it will relentlessly work it open and then devour not just the rational defences, but all the virtues they protect. Prudent keepers never let their beasts off a very short leash. And they never turn their back on them or forget what they are.

We cannot escape the beast. It is us; our very own nature. And we have to live with it, mostly in amity, until we find ourselves wrestling with it. And it doesn't fight fair. Reason on its own is no match for its persuasive and sometimes forceful blandishments, without a deep faith in what we know to be good and right, that entrenches bottom lines that are much harder to push aside.

Managing that is often very hard for an individual to do alone. That is why we need a powerful commons that will model virtue as a public ideal, strengthen our resolve to be worthy of it and considerate of others before self, supports us in hours of weakness and uncertainty, makes us accountable if we fail in our plain duty to ourselves and others, and forgives us and helps us to make amends, if we are truly repentant.

That is good governance and our need for it is as old as our species. It has always been thus. We presently suffer a temporary form of amnesia and hubris. The basic facts of life never go away. They hibernate in droughts and wait to repackage and re-assert themselves when the time is ripe. That is what we have a plain duty to facilitate, and if necessary impose on its recalcitrant enemies, for it is nothing if not 'inclusive'. While modern totalitarian societies have democratic features, we all know in our hearts just how constructed majorities are as statements of the status quo, and expressions of the will of the Corporatarchs and their Orthodox Libertarch helpers

That is what it means to be a secular fundamentalist and a conservative with a vision to make the world a bit better than it is, without getting too excited about the prospects. It will merely enable us to get through a decaying world order that is already starting to fray and deconstruct into what one day will be known as a post-modern period. It will likely be the greatest struggle our species has ever had to confront since it came out of the rift valley, a hundred thousand years ago.

When one considers the seriousness of the situation of not just the social commons, but the biological one that the market laissez-faire libertarians are busily smashing up, it should be plain that we are all playing for keeps. The stakes are becoming enormous. The status quo cannot be allowed to keep maintaining business-as-usual, because if it does, it will likely be the last march of the lemmings. And it will make anything that happened in the twentieth century look like a training warm up.

Democratic niceties and tolerance will become indulgences we can no longer sustain and expect to be still in business, perhaps before the middle of this century. We haven’t got the time or resources to play the game inside a corporate oligarchy that controls most of the means of persuasion. We just cannot afford to fail, with or without a majority. That is the fundamental bottom line and it is not one for the faint hearted.

We'll deal with porn world and the sex trade. We can't eliminate them, any more than we can eliminate them in ourselves, but we can drive them and the consuming fantasies on which they thrive, back into the underworld, which is where they belong; as contained as possible. And while that may produce hypocrisy among society’s weaker mostly male members, at least there will be a heavy and reinforced layer of deeply founded collective resolve placed over these now almost respectable renegades. This will ensure that they are vigorously managed, minimized and marginalized, as best we can, in the never ending vigilant toil that is social construction, maintenance, damage control and repair, whether it be in the cellars, or the upper stories of our nature.

It will always be a battle, but one that no society can afford to lose and expect to be in any fit state for long. At least half of any economy’s net worth is tied up there, in the collective and individual software between our ears, but particularly in a world where industrial throughput is shrinking in response to environmental constraints and the requirement to mount massive ecological recapitalization and defense works, in a period that is very likely to be destabilized and short of everything, at almost all levels.

The one thing that we will not have to ration will be consciousness and the obligation to be honest, decent and conscientious models to those around us and our successors, so that they may be the same, or better. Such a legacy is the mother and father of immortality. And the fact is that once basic needs are met, what productive effort could be better than that? It beats being surrounded by the glittering prizes of the market place, but feeling dead poor and forever teetering and skating on the edge of an existential cliff, where none of the normal leverages seem to work, or they do, but perversely.

So I say to my RADFEM 'conservative' feminist sisters, do not content yourselves with merely trying to set the record straight. The sexual revolution was always a con and women have been collectively had. It never was designed to liberate them. Whatever advances they have made, they have paid many times its value to get there. There are plenty of losses about which women are silent, because they are supposed to be liberated now, aren’t they? And the vast bulk of the appalling divorce rate is nothing if not the lamentable unhappiness of women.

Your libertarian social ‘progressive’ interlocutors are every bit the enemy of your future and that of your children as the corporate ‘progressives’ are. They are two sides of the same coinage. Go after them as if your life depended on it, because if you are under 45, it probably does. They are enemies, so start to behave is if they are. Deprive them of legitimacy. Call their bluff. Go on the attack. Do not be dictated to by the politics of politeness. Do not be silenced. Neither expect nor give quarter, for we are almost out of time. The wages of inaction will almost inevitably mean death at the hands of the usual spectres that specialise in that sort of thing; war, famine, pestilence...

You have nothing to lose because today is as good a day to die as any other. And in the end, if you aren't prepared to wager your life on your absolutely basic bottom lines; the fundamentals, then you just won't be in the game when the going gets really tough, because others will. Islam may have its heart in the seventh century, but it is robust and addresses all the existential issues I have flagged here. We would be completely deluded to believe it couldn’t do the job at a pinch, or persuade the numerously vulnerable, to help it force its way back into the center of world history.

This is not a call for revolution in the service of some ideal world order. This is finding yourself with your back to the wall and having to fight your way into a space where faith and reason meet in the middle, such that faith has some plausible basis and reason can be benchmarked against it. Then there is hope to save something out of the wreckage of modern times that will arm us into a difficult period; and where there are mechanisms for creating value that cannot be confiscated, lost or destroyed, if all goes ill.

If we are going to bequeath anything to our children worth having, this is where it starts, because....

Great journeys must be imagined first
and so trenchant in their intent
to slake the deepest kind of thirst,
it grasps imaginers by the throat
and tells them bluntly:
only through travail and trial,
by purging fire
and hammer blows be smote
can their spirit be reforged
and history's child
be sired.

This ordeal can either temper
or destroy
according to its whim,
or perhaps the pilgrims’ strength within.
Courage can surmount faint hearts,
but how can faith presume
that having gambled all,
there is a way to save us in the end?

There are no roads upon the other side,
except the ones we make,
every step perhaps at stake
our lives,
every view through soldiers’ eyes.

And so we wile away our days
beside brooding familiarities
that will not speak to us for fear
that it is not the sun that brightens
all that we hold dear,
but the bonfire of our vanities;
that the deepening darkening shade it castes
is not shadow,
but decaying sanity.

We look for hopeful signs,
but at midnight,
the clock rings its hands and says
in anguished tones,
“Ladies and Gentlemen,
it’s time.”