I had one of those dreams in the pre-dawn that left me unsettled as I wandered with divided focus down to the Loading Dock. I had been changing planes in a foreign airport, the international standards apparent, but with something behind them that wasn’t at all like home. I was a little disoriented, and partly lost. Aloft was the dark shape of The Eagle that has chosen these trees as a nesting point, and whose crisp three-wing beats at irregular intervals differentiates it from the soaring flight of the buzzards who share our property.

In the dream, I had no idea where the bags had gone. Upon waking reflection, I wondered at that part, since naturally the bags would be handled by the busy workmen on the tarmac below, and the role of big birds aloft was clearly separated by distance and aloof majesty.

Resolution of checked baggage followed with the unspoken destination. It was an unsaid word that carried a connotation of warmth and water. Then in mid-stride, Sunday’s bright dawn intruded and the dream faded away into the quiet of the back deck and dawn. Not city quiet, with a muted roar of traffic from the big eight-lane conduit headed into the Imperial City. The chickens next door were silent. No barking outside dogs broke the peace, though there was life in the sound of cows lowing in the middle distance. The only noise of life was the high-pitched and insistent hum of some sort of insect species voicing their concern with morning.

Swift immersion in the morning news had served its purpose for those sipping fresh coffee at the loading entrance, and Tropical storm Henri decided to abandon hurricane status and became a tropical storm as it came ashore in Long Island. Too soon to tell if the vortex was suitable to create the chaos that Super Storm Sandy brought in 2012, the tough year. That was the one in which my parents passed from this world taking theirs with them, and our wise pal Mac Showers. Vice Admiral Rex had been the first to depart of that cohort, on Pearl Harbor Day in 2009. When their departures were complete, it was a new world, and briefly one of our making.

What is happening now reflects it, as inexorable as the hum of the insects whose moment is now. The President’s confusion is part of it, of course. We don’t know who is actually crafting and writing the words he reads on the teleprompter, the ones that assure us somehow that an older generation is still in charge, still working for our benefit and future good. Of course, that is absurd, and just part of a generational change engineered by those whose ideas were considered even by them to be a little more than the nation was prepared to accept.

We live now in a political and partisan world in which everything has nuance and contextual truth we are not used to. The Writer’s Section at Socotra House are products of a system- you can label it as some sort of malign oppression, if you want, that decided going to the moon from the earth was a useful statement of resolve. Vietnam, a conflict that used a mass mobilization system devised to send hundreds of thousands of Americans to a warm place bordered by brilliant blue. It was the start of something not complete even now, and in which the nature and scope of the change has passed largely without comment.

But it is mostly accomplished without such appurtenances. The profound nature of it is interesting, if a bit disconcerting. The world inhabited by the last generation, the one that taught us what to consider and how to act, is gone like the dust in the urns we buried with sentiment and long-standing ritual. We are now device-driven by wildly differing streams of information. On one stream there is revealed Truth, almost religious in its assertions of how things must be. Another reflects an older set of values, ones no longer congruent with another vision of how a world with eight billion relatively sentient fellow members of the species will work.

Some of the institutions of the old world still exist but have changed. The artifacts of a global war fought by mostly willing conscripts was an instrument of that change. An all volunteer force made adventures overseas less controversial than sending our own children to peer at the elephant, and the composition of those in crisis overseas reflects the change. An unknown number of our citizens are at risk, but many were part of a curious merging of the commercial and military worlds that permitted adventures overseas without any particular impact on domestic life.

We were warned about the possibilities of that, but went ahead with the experiment in which the nature of loss and tragedy were no longer part of a shared experience. The sense of loss that accompanied the fall of Saigon was directly reflected in some of the assorted crises that followed. The swift collapse of Afghanistan’s government and the possibility of tens of thousands of potential hostages are a reflection of an event comingled with the power of a single unusual storm, barely not of hurricane strength, impacting Montauk Point at the eastern end of the storied Hamptons.

It reflects the new world. Some welcome it as the change they have struggled to achieve, the one in which a global order is being overthrown. Others, like the Writer’s Section, apply old truths hard-learned to a world that does not reflect them.

It is a circle of an old order not yet passed and suddenly aware of the depth of change. Some joke about now having an understanding of the collapse of Rome in antiquity. Others mutter, not morose, that it is simply a reflection of a change inescapable as the insistent whine of the living world that surrounds us.

It is Sunday in the country. Belmont Farms is closed today, but having accustomed themselves to rural rhythms, we are prepared, in the way of older times, to deal with what is to come.

Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com