The Good Life Has Turned to Ashes in our Mouths

Let's get ready for Ash Wednesday.  This Ash Wednesday, let's engage in METANOIA, a change in one's way of thinking, in personal and societal change.

“Alinsky may not have been a theoretician, but his view of what was ailing post-war America influenced generations of community organizers.  When an interviewer asked him if he agreed with Nixon that there was a conservative “silent majority” that disdained everything about the sixties, he dismissed the idea, but said the country was in a state of terrible disruption and likely to move either toward a “native American fascism” or toward radical social change.

Right now they’re frozen, festering in apathy, leading what Thoreau called “lives of quiet desperation.”  They’re oppressed by taxation and inflation, poisoned by pollution, terrorized by urban crime, frightened by the new youth culture, baffled by the computerized world around them.  They’ve worked all their lives to get their own little house in the suburbs, their, color TV, their two cars, and now their good life seems to have turned to ashes in their mouths.  Their personal lives are generally unfulfilling their jobs unsatisfying, they’ve succumbed to tranquilizers and pep pills, they drown their anxieties in alcohol, they feel trapped in long term endurance marriages or escape into guilt-ridden divorces.  They’re losing their kids and they’re losing their dreams.  They’re alienated, depersonalized, without any feeling of participation in the political process, and they feel rejected and hopeless… All their old values seem to have deserted them, leaving them rudderless in a sea of social chaos (from an interview with Saul Alinsky in Playboy, March 1972).  [Quoted in Remnick, 2010, p.127-128]"