in the Universal scheme of things

All the news isn't good, you know. An article I read yesterday, and blogged about here on +Time but decided not to link on Facebook, went off on society's plunge into individual solitary alonenesses in which, caring not for others around us, we escape into our electronic screens. We've become a civilization of hermits. Life is like finding yourself on a cruise with nobody else on board, some of us find it discouraging about life in general. 

This morning I read an essay in The Hechinger Report about a crisis in the deepening shortage of 18 year olds, extending to alarming rates of colleges and universities closing across the country, shortage of young people with college degrees, present and coming changes in our civilization and how it works, and our values. 

We've already been seeing the results in the Church, where theological seminaries have been combining and closing for a decade and more as fewer and fewer people are drawn toward a vocation in the Church, which itself is declining as fewer and fewer people identify with, affiliate, attend, and participate. COVID gave an impetus to that, as people realized they suddenly had an excuse to quit being involved with church, and didn't return. Credibility, values, beliefs and trust are factors there as well.  

Things are changing and we cannot change them back, ours is not to panic and try to invent emergency measures to hang on and delay, but to change with and accommodate. Will there be Christianity in a thousand years? In a hundred years? What will education teach people? How will government treat people? Empires rise and fall, and democracies, a hundred percent of them, ours has already reached a plateau and slowing. What to do about it? we are already Doing, as are electorates across Europe as well as ours.

Am I actually discouraged? No, I don't think so, but I do have sense enough to watch, see, observe, experience, realize that everything is changing, and faster than it has before, and not always in ways and directions that seem best. It's interesting to be present as structures and values collapse. There's a love song, "I wouldn't have missed it for the world."

Here we are. Does it really matter?

T89&c