For Everything There Is A Season

Dear Editor:

While this is my response to Alex Symington’s Nov. 7 column entitled “Big Picture, Small Pond”, I must say the opening of his first sentence arrested me:  “When I write, my inclination is to focus on national or global big picture issues…”  Well, this so triggered my imagination, that I’m only impelled to address our national and/or global “big picture”.

Robinson Jeffers, Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, America’s most prophetic poets, all advocate a cyclic world-view: birth, growth, death, decay and rebirth. These cycles happen generationally, seasonally or on a daily basis – if one believes in microcosms… and, I do.

So, why don’t we realize this cyclic reality on a political level?  Why did Thomas Jefferson say in so many word that there should be a revolution in government every 20 years?  That’s a cycle to be sure.

But why should we only listen to comparatively modern literary prophets, when we can go back thousands of years ago to the Bible’s “Book of Ecclesiastes 3:1-8”?  In the mid-50’s, folk-songwriter Pete Seeger slightly modified that Solomonic text, which in the 60’s became an international pop hit, Turn! Turn! Turn! by The Byrds.  How cyclic! Here’s a modern translation of the original text:

For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven:

A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to sew and a time to reap;

A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to destroy, and a time to build;

A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

A time to cast stones, and a time to gather them together;

A time to embrace, and a time to be chaste;

A time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to discard;

A time to rend, and a time to mend; a time for silence, and a time to speak;

A time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.

But, nationally, such ancient common sense is not lucrative enough for our politicos, who only promote perpetual war for their own personal benefit — but to the detriment of America, their cash cow.  And so it goes…Turn! Turn! Turn!… to an unimagined global revolution?

And that’s my take on the national and global “big picture”,  Mr. Symington.  And, I think it holds true for those of us in the microcosmic “small pond” of Key West, too.

John N. Gish Jr.