Shadowlight's Lighthouse

For context: http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/19649309/dems-gop-join-ballfield-team-scalise-honor-wounded-colleague

Did you hear that the Congresscritters had that baseball game they were practicing for, yesterday? The Democrats won 11-2, then handed over the trophy to the Republicans to put in Rep. Scalise's office (the racist homophobe House majority whip who got shot and who was then saved by a same-sex-married black woman bodyguard. I'd like to think that he will carefully consider that detail of his detail, that he will emerge from the hospital a changed man. I'd settle for a haunted man. I'm expecting somewhat less than I'm hoping for.) Hillary voters are talking about how heartwarming it was. To me, it perfectly encapsulates the Democrats' whole problem: even when we win, we lose. We play nice, they play for keeps. They cause a problem, then blame us for it.* ....We bring a delicious homemade blueberry cobbler to a gunfight.

(*I'm infuriated by the internet comments from conservatives who seem to think _we're_ the monsters. One of them even said liberals want to starve old people. I don't understand how they can have a view of reality a full 180 degrees away from mine and yet not slam into walls trying to walk around corners. But, in fairness, I also saw this opinion piece from the Far Left. While I sympathize with the anger behind the sentiment, I cannot agree with his conclusion: https://medium.com/@SonofBaldwin/let-them-fucking-die-c316eee34212 ...surely there is a middle ground between giving away the store and punching people in the face. Unless you're being mugged, I guess.

I'm not sure what is to be done. There's no shortage of people on the internet arguing over what the perfect clean seashell-wiping future should look like, but before we can build this intersectional omnigendered color-corrected world, first we need to find some way to win the war with the Yestermen, hurt them like they hurt us, use their systems against them.
The Tomorrowers want to roll out the cultural future for beta testing as each new piece is developed. I don't think they've really worked the bugs out (not that most culture is debugged before being implemented. Usually the extraneous bits get snapped off as the car zooms down the road) and I'm fairly well-read and open-minded (i think), but even I can't figure out how it all fits together. I suspect the sort of people who would rather be seen as mean than as stupid probably hate this plan (with its myriad pronouns and conditional rules and not being able to say the word 'stupid' because it's an ableist slur and so on) because deep down, they think they can't keep up. Is it ableist of us to insist that they keep up? Is it ableist to assume that they can sift out true facts from propaganda on their own? Is it actually surprising that they would choose a past they think they know over a future that's constantly shifting, growing, and demanding more and more of their attention?
Maybe the future needs a display model. A 21st century Mayberry so people can see the values in action.

http://gameofthrones.wikia.com/wiki/Winter_is_Coming_(motto)

ok, well... I came across this idea and I've been obsessed with it for seven months. I'll expect I'll be at it until year's end, at least. *summarizing*
In any human endeavor, be it an empire or an individual's relationship with something important to him, there are four metaphorical seasons....
Spring is also called the Golden Age. You've just discovered X, and it rocks your socks. You want to tell everybody because New Idea X is gonna change the world. ... Spring= Golden = Simplicity.

Summer is the Silver Age. It's no longer enough to just have the idea and spread the idea. Now you need to get complex, to dig into the permutations of the idea, research related fields, make rules and guidelines and best practices. Summer = Silver = Complexity

then you get to Fall, the Season of Perplexity. the Dark Age. You doubt the rules you spent so much time learning, you question the wisdom of the whole idea, you begin to reverse the previous assumptions to see if the idea works with different rules. You begin to wonder if you know anything about x, really, and if you were even right to preach x to others. (You also see the flaws which were almost invisible to you during your earlier excitement.)

Finally, you stumble free of the darkness, and find yourself at harmony with your doubts. You enter a Renaissance wherein you look back on the previous ages and decide what was good and what was bad, what to keep and what to toss, and in this fashion you sustain yourself through the Winter of Harmony, and prepare yourself for the next transformation of the idea into something new. You wait for someone to invent Idea Y and start the cycle over again.
I didn't make this from scratch.

It's from Brian McLaren's _Naked Spirituality_ , where it's the seasons of faith an individual goes through. (Spring and Simplicity are the zeal of the new convert, for instance) and also (quite independently, I imagine) from Grant Morrison's _Supergods_ where it's the ages of the superhero comic (Golden Age, Silver Age, Dark Age, and Renaissance). Sister Moon helped me understand it's really the same as the literal Golden Age of Rome, or whatever... that it's universal.

I've noticed that pen&paper roleplaying games have also gone through the four ages, albeit twice as fast as comicbooks. Replace 'Superman' with 'D&D' and you have the First Generation of RPGs, when it was enough to have an ampersand and a gimmick, to stake out some new territory. Pick a genre, get a license for some geek-popular setting, or just have an angle (no elves! only elves! Christian chivalry! etc.) The default approach was Gamist (i.e. this is a variant of wargaming, like comics are a variant of pulp magazines. The means may differ, but the objective is to play, overcome ever-better challenges, and win.)
Then came the complexity of the Universal Systems, the Second Generation (e.g. GURPS, the Hero System), with rules for every likely aspect of common reality (falling damage, disease progression, bartering with merchants, hunting wildlife) and various variant realities (how undead work in a horror game, how the neural computer interfaces of the future work, and so on), joining the various genres and settings into large hegemonies, and gripping ever-more-tightly specific settings with elaborate rules specially tailored to match them. The approach became Simulationist (i.e. the objective is to experience fiction interactively, surrounded by a cocoon of rules so that no move takes you outside the illusion of the game-world)
This, naturally, led to the Dark Age of Gaming, exemplified by Vampire: the Masquerade. Rules-light replaced rule complexity, emphasis on story replaced emphasis on mechanics, and the sort of creatures you'd kill without remorse in D&D became the player character options. Some 3rd generation games even toyed with self-referential play, creative nonfiction, -- with breaking the fourth wall, piercing the cocoon, and bleeding 'reality' into the game world and vice versa. The approach became (quite militantly, at first) Narrativist (i.e. the objective is to cooperatively tell the best story you can, and the rules exist only to facilitate that.)
After the militant ascendance of Story subsided, gamers started to understand that the three approaches were not mutually exclusive warring camps, but separate elements of the overall gaming experience. That is, each player has some expectation that a game is a game, that these games simulate, and that stories are told using these games. A given player may prefer one over the other two, or two of them over the third, or some mixture of all three, but no one really likes a game that ignores or completely flunks one of the elements. When people began creating RPGs that balanced the three approaches, the Gaming Renaissance began --not that anyone ever calls it that.
Each game tends to sing its own praises, so far, but you can tell them by the way they use words like 'combine' and 'inspired': as in, _Icons_ is "inspired by the fast-playing old-school games and the new generation of narrative role-play". ('Old-school' gets mentioned a lot now, and tends to mean 1st generation games.) _Mutants & Masterminds_ has a similar frosting of narrative play mechanics but the cake is a detailed 2nd generation style ruleset. _Savage Worlds_ aims at being a rules-light universal system with a wargaming/gamist feel, promising detail where you like it but speedy simplicity where the math would get in the way. The Fourthcore movement strives to prove you can play in the old-school style even with the newer rules. _Munchkin_ and _Arkham Horror_ reap their riches by simulating the experience of gamist play (in a more rules-light way than the original sources). I've never played MMOs like WoW, but they might very well be the ultimate in complex gamist play. Small wonder that paper-gamers are moving in the opposite direction, ceding that pasture where they can't compete. Even D&D itself is retiring its WoW-wannabe 4th edition in favor of an edition described as a mixture of its first three editions.

Why do I tell you all this, aside from the possibility that I'm slightly crazy and only write what things demand to be written? Because I'm beginning to think that America itself, its pop culture zeitgeist, its politics, its economics ... has come, or is coming, into its Winter. Everywhere, we're looking back. Retro fashions and period-piece dramas on tv. Regressive politics drowning out the progressive. It's like we can't move forward, have a real 21st century way of doing things, until we've digested and come to consensus on what happened in the 20th century.
Assuming my hypothesis is correct, what benefit do we gain from knowing it? Can we win over the citizens of Pleasantville with some new sociopolitical movement that promises to combine the best parts of the past with the best parts of the present era, some kind of Society for Creative Americanism, founded to envision the 20th Century As It Should Have Been? Do we extrapolate Brian McLaren's advice for a personal winter to the society at large, calling for silent reflection and grateful inward meditation on what has passed? Do we tell them to Keep Calm and Carry On, confident that seasons will pass and a new Spring will come, in time? or do we struggle furiously to build something new to fill the void as old pillars crumble, fearful that the new empire won't be much to our liking unless it's the one we build ourselves?

p.s. the parts of American life that don't appear to be withering are the parts that tend to involve the Internet, which may well still be enjoying its Golden Age, or Silver at most. The initial dotcom gold rush may be over, but people are still discovering new things they can do with the Net, fueling bursts of new growth. Also, multinational corporations and financial sector manipulators are doing just dandy, but I'd rather they didn't inherit the earth from hapless governments that drowned in a bathtub. ... The urge to deconstruct is typical of Dark Ages, while the urge to reconstruct is typical of renaissances. A member of Occupy Wall Street told me once they were trying to 'reconstruct government'. This was before they were forced out and marginalized and vanished from the news. Things like that make it hard to Keep Calm.

My city is big enough to have homeless people (particularly since it's the central point for various dried-up state aid services, including mental health services) but small enough that you can recognize most of them after a while... if you look. I don't claim I always do look. One of these recurring figures is an elderly woman in a big black raincoat that drapes over her like a cloak. She walks around with a wheeled metal luggage rack containing a pile of black (read: opaque) plastic trash bags, each tied up tightly. I learned her name a month ago when one of the women from my church was worrying about where Sophia would go during the hurricane, or if anyone had even warned her that it was coming. ... Tonight, I went to the grocery store to buy milk and Sophia was sleeping, sitting on a bench in the vestibule of the store, next to the carts. I didn't want to wake her, because I figured she didn't have much time before the store closed and then they'd (probably) make her leave. I wondered, as I shopped, if there was something I could do for her, without waking her up; but i don't know enough about her situation to know what she really needs. I'm not sure I've ever heard her voice. In the end, I just slid my shopping cart back into the corral as quietly as I could, and said 'God bless you.' just loud enough to be heard, and went out with my groceries into the chilly night, feeling like I was about to cry. (I made my brother cry once, with something I wrote. Perhaps I could do that again, if that would be what made him finally see that liberalism is about the government doing communally those various things that as individuals we know we ought to do but seldom actually choose to do. On the other hand, that was when he stopped reading my writing. I'd hate to see him stop listening to my voice.) ... It's cold enough tonight that I turned on the heat in my apartment, even though heat rises from the two floors below. I sit here drinking tea and I think about those out in the cold tonight, and hope that Christ is out there with them.