The mariner knows that he views the world as chaos. Surely, his readership knows that by now. He is, but as Amos, a minor prophet in a sheepskin crying in the wilderness – and likely has fleas.

The chaos is real.

The reader should take a long view. The Federal government is an archaic dysfunction that drifts further from the current values of social, technical, moral, and governmental truth. This is spoken without regard to political party, tea parties or progressives; the mariner did suggest that the reader take the long view. That vows are taken on the names of Washington, Lincoln, FDR, Kennedy and Reagan is evidence that Congress and the President live in the past. The real world has traveled through that history and has moved on dramatically to a new reality.

Our beliefs linger with an agricultural society that no longer exists. The rural image that carried us this far has ruined our cities, left behind the rural family structure, and left the United States, if not other countries as well, with a false comfort that social structures exist as they did in the 1960’s.

How do we as citizens confront the disappearance of privacy – not just personal privacy but privacy that is taken from us and used to manipulate our freedom of choice and even our view of reality?

How do we as citizens confront the advances in medical science that enable regeneration of skin and organs that will provide perpetual life?

How do we as citizens, particularly US citizens, dismantle an ever hardening plutocracy?

How do we as citizens deal with lingering prejudice, particularly racial hatred and gun violence? This is not so much a phenomenon as it is an indication of incompetence and an inability to deal with reality.

How do cities recover an economic model that provides jobs and feeds their populations?

What is the impact of technical capability in ipads and iphones that liberates us from the rooted morality of the twentieth century?

The citizen ignores a dramatic shift in the social fabric.

This is as it should be. Change is a violent wrenching of the status quo into a new definition of society. It will not come from a Congress of profit-taking millionaires. It will come from the people – individually and collectively – an image not to be perceived as the riots of the 1910’s or the abruptness of the FDR era, but as a pragmatic move toward individual reward. How that plays out cannot be predicted. Just note that change is expensive to the individual as well as to institutions.

The mariner is wary of the imbalance of reality as we know it. Be prepared.

Ancient Mariner