Bøger af Donald DeMarco

The expression, "Footprints on the Sands of Time," appears in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's celebrated poem, "A Psalm of Life". It represents an imaginative conjunction of life and death. Though we are mortal, we can leave footprints for succeeding generations. Thus, there is life in death. These footprints symbolize continuity and hope, as well as generosity and guidance. While we live, we know that we are running out of the grains of sand which have been allotted to us. This realization that our time is limited should provide us with a strong incentive to do something to give our life meaning and make a contribution to those who follow.

This book addresses the mayhem that has been sweeping America. Life is imperiled, philosophy is denigrated, and churches are under attack. The agents of correction are paralyzed. Leaders are not leading. The Media is adding fuel to the fire. The words of William Butler Yeats come to mind: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed. . .The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.The war against civility (and civilization itself) is the inevitable consequence of moral bankruptcy on a pandemic scale. The solution is a return to virtue, a road that will be extremely difficult to reconstruct. Nonetheless, an understanding of the situation, if only a partial one, is the first step toward a return to civility.

The present age in the United States has been dubbed "The Age of the Absurd". There is good reason for this appellation. Nonetheless, an absurdity can be recognized as such and avoided. Insanity is another thing. When the light of reason has been extinguished, insane actions cannot be recognized by insane people for what they are. They can no longer be engaged in rational discourse. America has crossed the line from "The Age of the Absurd" to the "The Age of Insanity".Ortega spoke of "A hurricane of farcicality" that was "everywhere and in every form" that was sweeping over Europe. What he referred to may not have been as utterly ludicrous as what is now given currency in the United States.

The Twelve Supporting Pillars of the Culture of Life centers on two things: what is needed to produce a civil society, and what is transpiring to bring it to ruin. The problem that currently faces us consists of a broad range of factors. They include the personal and familial, the social and political, the moral and the spiritual, language and literature, and the philosophical and the religious. We are assaulted on all fronts. Therefore, we need to be informed, realistic, resourceful, diligent, and courageous.The rejection of reason goes hand in hand with the rejection of God. The individual has replaced the Deity and reason has been replaced by will. At the same time, this is not a pessimistic book since it emphasizes the fact that the capacity to reason and think about things is still present in the human being. We need to be who we are destined to be: rational human beings who love life and are eager to share it lovingly with others. The first and vital step in reforming society is in the awareness of what is happening around us. This book is dedicated to that proposition, with the fervent hope that it will be of assistance to those readers who are concerned about the cultural crisis in which we are presently engulfed.

Writing from the ¿underground¿ and attempting to dialogue with a world in disarray represents a twofold problem. But it also represents a twofold challenge. My position in the ¿underground¿ should not be compared with Dostoevsky¿s narrator in his Notes from the Underground, except as a criticism of governments who, by planning for utopia, disregard the rights of so many of its citizens. I write from the ¿underground¿ because I oppose the reigning ideology of the day which is political correctness. To be politically incorrect is to be marginalized from society and seen as a pariah. Nonetheless, even as an underground writer, I still have a voice that can be heard and what I feel is a corrective that can be applied. This work is an attempt to offer ideas that are missing from the popular agenda. It is a compilation of ¿notes,¿ rather than a series of lengthy argumentations, offered to people of good will who are disturbed by the incoherence of contemporary thinking and are seeking to place their moral convictions on a more rational, secure, and consistent basis.