Opinion: The road to Bethlehem

Sometimes it’s hard to see it, though, isn’t it? Reading about the meth lab that was raided last week — about ingredients so toxic that the investigators and cleanup crews had to wear “moon suits”; reading that the ingredients included things like lithium batteries and fertilizer, and that they were being cooked up to sell to people who were planning to inhale them — it had to seem that the road to hell could also be paved with really bad intentions.

Thinking about it all, I remembered a Joan Didion book called “Slouching Toward Bethlehem.” Ms. Didion and I were both living in Southern California when Charles Manson and his band of followers were committing murder and wreaking havoc there. It was a time when some fairly sonorous voices were heralding (as they are now) the end of the world, and several religious communities were pulling up stakes and heading somewhere to await the Rapture. Ms. Didion took all of the craziness of that time (the late 1960s) and poured it into a book, which she called “Slouching Toward Bethlehem.”

The title refers back to a W.B. Yeats poem called “The Second Coming” that had been written exactly 50 years earlier, at the sputtering end of World War I, in which the dead and injured numbered in the tens of millions and whole countries were bankrupted as well as destroyed. To Yeats, the future of life on earth looked so dim that he wasn’t sure there was one: “mere anarchy” had been “loosed upon the world,” and it seemed likely that the next thing would be the Antichrist, emerging from the desert, with “a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.” The poem ends with Yeats asking, “What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”

And the answer, it always seems, is, “Well, that’s up to you. Don’t want the rough beast? Good. Try loving your neighbor. Feeding the hungry. Caring for the children of the world — the innocents who didn’t bring starvation, illness and ignorance on themselves.” And so on. We all know the rules. As Robert Fulghum made a lot of money pointing out to us — since we seem to keep forgetting — everything we really needed to know, we learned in kindergarten.

We have to share to get somewhere. We need to support our schools, since — as a friend of mine points out at least once a month — good schools build good communities. We need to make sure that the most vulnerable among us receive care. The wonderful thing about Commerce is that so many people here already know this, and live it. The rest of us (we know who we are!) can aspire to emulate them and try to pave the road to heaven with good acts. We may find that it leads right here!

Susan Harper is retired, lives in Commerce and volunteers with the Commerce Public Library and the Jackson County Literacy Program.