THE END TIMES, TIME & TIME AGAIN

Were you in Persepolis in 330 BC? Or Jerusalem in 70 AD? Or Rome around 450 AD? No, but you are in Paris in 1940 when the End Times crash into French society as Hitler's armies enter the defeated city. We're all there whenever we watch that rain-soaked train station in "Casablanca" as Bogart desperately looks for Bergman.

In that tragic scene we're caught in a collision of noisy fears. Panicked people fleeing the enemy... order crumbling into chaos...families ripping apart...authority dissolving from sight. As in the other cities, Paris' institutions are failing to hold. The very ground beneath their lives is crumbling!

Whenever and wherever this happens to a society, it's like the End Times. Very much as in today's America where virtually every institution is teetering under the assaults of doubt and rejection. Government... education...justice...religion...health-care. The pillars designed to hold up the structure of civilization are suddenly out of joint. No one seems in charge. And if they are, their charge seems under suspicion.

When the leaders in those staggering cities were no longer being heard or believed, what was left? The only sure sensation left was the sky had at last fallen. Now it was every person for them self. And even though on the face of it Americans in 2010 still get up in the morning, go to work, pay attention to stoplights, answer the census, and tell their children to follow the rules, somewhere deep inside a terror gnaws: Is all this a charade just before the collapse...?

History is not always a sure answer, but surely all those other cities are still here. Well, in the case of Persepolis it's only a tourist attraction in Iran these days, but it has long outlived its destroyer, Alexander the Great. At least one reason to keep getting up in the morning, and paying attention to the stoplights....!