I fear that a force of evil has been unleashed

[Hortensis]

12. We've been here before.

Apparently Yeats saw events of the 1890s as beginning the decline of civilization, with the wars, rise of fascism, authoritarian socialism, and collapse of order in many nations following over the next quarter century. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin the other day said she sees this this new era of destabilizing anxiety over enormous changes and threats as similar to the 1890s. (My words.)

The Second Coming
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Time to remember that our grandparents' generations saved the United States from succumbing. They used the problems of that era to make great but stabilizing advances within the existing system, including redistribution of income and regulations on capitalism, that created our greatest period of prosperity to date.

Our turn.