STEWARDS OF EXTINCTION:

The planets have moved around us and we have moved within them. Plying the trade for men's souls has become decentralized; either left to zealots on a battlefield or those whose with historic responsibility that enslaves change.  We are at a point in human history in which the shortcomings of our fathers have been visited on us.  Some misguided sense of loyalty has left us wanting each and every time we try to justify or align to their myopia. Redistribution began but stopped when those who experienced for the first time advantage formerly given as a birthright became addicted to it. The wreckage of European colonialism smolders on each continent.  Hard fought rights are trivialized by a parade of disaffected generations. They are right to laugh at reminders- it could happen again. Right because when we are visited again, it will be so much worse that it was before. We are ill prepared to exist outside our systems.  Kings and Caliphs are souvenirs. Paranoia plays on weak minds.  All occurs with one exception.  That galvanizing sense of commonality we struggle to suppress, the Babylon where too much outward happiness was sinful enough to warrant punishing divisions into language tribes; all the failings combined are dwarfed by what is coming.   The things required to sustain life itself have become polluted by our failing to understand cumulative effect.  If we wrote ritual today, what metaphor would we play on?  Dead trees, dead forests?   Neglect killed the last unicorn? Nowhere to run. Tainted air. Fouled water.  Protective layers weakened causing ecological change.  Does the calculus of masonry include these calculations?  Are contemporary masons, students of science and the arts become stewards of extinction?  Can we awaken the alchemists?