Nothing's the way it's supposed to be

Nothing is urgent anymore. Nothing touches us or grips us or gives us pause. We have become lost in an incomprehensible noise. People today no longer get stirred up by what's around them. They don't seem to notice - they don't care. The present has lost its preciousness; gone is a sense of urgency, a sense of action.

Ours, is a time of passiveness. We have lost our claim to the present. Weakly, we forfeited it. We drift on towards some vague future.

The consequence of that drift has been a forgetfulness - a forgotten sense of what once was important. We have forgotten what we once thought was possible. We have allowed ourselves to be caught in a drift, a dangerous drift.

"The dangerous drift toward isolated enmity," Bobby Kennedy once warned, "soon may find us looking at each other across impassible barriers of suspicion and anger."

Impassable barriers of suspicion and anger. It must have seemed so far away then - so avoidable. It must have seemed so distant from what was going to happen, from what was going to be the future. People believed, Bobby believed, the drift could be stopped. Yet Bobby also understood the fragile nature of time. He understood how easy it is to drift, because to stopping time from drifting requires effort. Stopping the drift requires effort and emotion and vulnerability and hurt.

Martin and Bobby were willing to make that effort - they made themselves vulnerable, they made us believe the drift could be stopped. They made us believe in what was possible. But when they were taken, we allowed time to drift. We allowed the world that they dreamed possible to brush past us.

And so, we drifted further and further to where we are now. And here we are; a generation tempered by scandal, cynical about its past, dedicated to a world of suspicion and anger.

Somewhere in quite places a whisper tells us that we've lost our way. The whisper reminds us that we stopped dreaming of things as they could be and started accepting them as they are. Bitterly, even angrily, we accepted things as they are. We stopped communicating, stopped risking ourselves and we started to let fear spread its roots deep into our hearts. We stopped being stirred up, we try hard not to care.

But still, quietly the whisper reminds us - this is not the way it's supposed to be. That we cherish is now in danger because we have left it in the hands of fear and indifference. People forgot the urgency of now. Some say people are tired of being told what to do; to do more, to improve themselves, to do better.

Well I say: please, stop the present - I want to get off.