A timely tale, because some things never change!

 I just finished reading Dicken's "A Tale of Two Cities."  I read it a decade or so ago and thought it an excellent book, and upon perusing it anew, must thoroughly agree with my previous self.  I know modern humanity thinks itself the epitome of virtue and wisdom, so much more enlightened than all that came before, but in reading a book over a hundred years old, I find that humanity hasn't changed at all, much as an even more ancient book proclaims that it won't.  Our tools and toys and notions and fads may change, but the human heart never does, save by divine intervention.  I've often wondered what the two cities are, much as many Tolkien fans wonder about the two towers.  The simple answer would be London and Paris, but this is not a simple book, instead I wonder if it is not the City of Man and the City of God.  While we do not have the social and cultural chaos that enlivened the French Revolution, we certainly have the moral chaos in our so-called enlightened modern lives, in both extreme right and left thinking, and like those bloody revolutionaries of Dicken's tale, very few seem to realize that one can indeed be a real, thinking human person without falling off either extreme end of the spectrum, for both place their hope in the City of Man, this broken, wretched world, and think that somehow their antics can make it a paradise, when in fact we're only going from one sort of deplorable to another, much as the Revolution was just as bad as the abuses of the monarchy and aristocracy it replaced.

What is the answer then?  It isn't more rampant individualism, more 'rights,' more 'woke,' it isn't in the courts or the president or any governmental body or in more of anything of the hash of a banquet we've been imbibing non-stop since at least the 1970s, rather it is the complete opposite.  Our only hope is in reason, virtue, truth, self control and discipline, humility and sacrifice, instead of making our own happiness the ultimate goal, and the goal of our government and culture and relationships, a goal we will never achieve thereby, rather we must seek the good, the right, the true, that which is the foundation of reality and the human soul, we must seek outside ourselves, look to the good of others, and be willing to serve rather than being served.  Instead we throw a cultural temper tantrum, uprooting the very reality we inhabit, denying and mutilating it to fit our transitory and theoretical needs and demanding everyone do likewise.  Like the naked emperor in the old tale, is there even one little peasant child who can boldly proclaim the truth to an entirely deceived world?  We can't overcome evil with more evil or selfishness, rather we can overcome it with good, with real love, and therein and only thereby, will we ever truly be happy.  Only by losing our lives can we find them, only in giving it up, can we gain the whole world!