WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT & MARLON BRANDO RIDES IN

There's something about the dark. When the lights go out and darkness seeps in, we have to confront our own feelings and fears. Oh, and there are so many lights in our life, often noticed only after they've gone out....

Like the lights to our children's bedrooms after they've gone to college...or the lights to our parents' old home once they've gone to their grave...or the lights of nations when, as British Prime Minister Gray said when WWI was beginning in 1914, "The lamps all cross Europe are going out."

There are even those lights whose story are totally unknown to you, such as the kitchen lights across my street which go on and off with a regularity I would miss were it ever broken.

So what then are we to do in the dark? And with the dark? Depends probably on how well we can see our way in the dark. Which is to say, how prepared are we for these endings? Life is a continuous sequence of endings and new beginnings. But while the endings usually happen by themselves, the beginnings usually depend on us. How well we are equipped to confront, to adjust to, and to manage the attending losses.

Right now -- as in 1914 -- lamps all across America are going out. Their precious light of national hope and harmony is being extinguished almost with each 24-hour news cycle. Unemployment lines...foreclosed homes ....pickets and demonstrations... throw-the-bums-out elections....hysterical conspiracies concocted by the punditry. This is a democracy and so it is that social order easily breaks down when things go wrong. Indeed, order itself is condemned as something darkly dangerous being imposed by the greatest danger of all: Government.

Anger like this is, of course, always a secondary emotion. Anger inevitably comes from some primary emotion. Pride.....envy....unrequited love...usually though just sheer fear. When the times are out of joint -- as they are with historical regularity in every society in every age -- fear ignites. Which in turn torches the passions of anger. At something, someone, anything! In Marlon Brando's cult movie "The Wild One," he plays a black-jacketed biker taking over a town. When the frightened people ask, "What are you angry at..?" Brando smirks "Whattaya got...?"

I'm pretty sure the bedroom lights here and the kitchen lights across the street will come back on again. I'm not so sure how long it will take for the nation's lights to come back on again. Once a torch-lit crowd gets angry enough, often it will not be sated until it burns everything in its path...