How Will It End?

Three Muslim students killed in North Carolina. Jewish hostages killed at a kosher market in Paris. The Charlie Hebdo massacres. The NAACP firebombed in Colorado. And it’s just February.

How will it end, how it will end?

this bleak year, year of blind rats,

this bleak year of rage and rancor,

you ask, you ask me, how will it end?

—Pablo  Neruda, Chronicle of 1948 (America)

4 Comments

  1. Jara Handala February 12, 2015 at 10:35 am | #

    On the day the world ends . . .

    And those who expected lightning and thunder
    Are disappointed.
    And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
    Do not believe it is happening now.
    As long as the sun and the moon are above,
    As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
    As long as rosy infants are born
    No one believes it is happening now.

    Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
    Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
    Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
    There will be no other end of the world,
    There will be no other end of the world.

    (Milosz, Warsaw, 1944)

  2. Brett February 12, 2015 at 11:19 am | #

    I guess it either fades away, or you just get used to it. I remember reading an article about modern China, about how there were all these bombings and stabbings from disgruntled folks that you never hear about over here, and probably not too often over there because of the censorious state media.

  3. xenon2 February 12, 2015 at 3:23 pm | #

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  4. Donald Pruden, Jr., a/k/a The Enemy Combatant February 17, 2015 at 12:26 pm | #

    End? Who says it will end?

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