Toys in Brooklyn

We spent the weekend visiting friends in Brooklyn, shopping at the Strand bookstore, playing and helping with Junior Knicks basketball at the Y. But through it all I could never push out of my mind the war in Iraq, the President’s “surge,” and the sabre rattling aimed at Iran. The Times ran an editorial today about William Butler Yeats’ poem The Second Coming relating it to current events. The poem was written at the end of World War I at a particularly bleak point in history, and I can’t help but feel we are on the verge of slipping into our own era’s senseless world war–call it World War III. Who will rise to stop this insanity? As Yeats wrote, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”