Our plans for the day were delayed and put on hold because of this morning’s ~1200 word dream write-up. The impact of it was not one of relaxation. It is fair to say that there is a gathering darkness in humanity today. There is much strident and vitriolic rhetoric and a president calling for execution before any trial. Lynching has historical precedent in the USA just as the King of Judea reportedly ordered infanticide. Before long Trump might crucify thousands of illegal immigrants along Pennsylvania Avenue just for PR and a sound bite. Darkness is percolating, disappearances gradually escalate and increase in number. The intellectuals are kneeled; books may be burned.

Echoes of Mussolini, Franco, de Oliveira Salaza and Hitler can be heard around the globe. The thin end of the wedge has already found purchase; all it needs now is to be driven firmly home. The spectre of totalitarianism spreads insidiously across the northern hemisphere.

It is possible that on this anti-immigration wave we will be booted out and deported from France.

I find it hard when some people claim to be Christian and to follow Jesus yet they exhibit hateful, vengeful ways. They do not turn the other cheek. They kill and they maim. That is not Christian.

A new dark and unpleasant chapter in human history is in the process of unfolding. The jackboot and the Kevlar vested masked agents are the harbingers. Some newspapers call climate change action “the net-zero lunacy”. The tide has changed against any semblance of sanity. The baying monosyllabic has overtaken the considered.

Maybe that is what humanity really needs, darkness. Deep malignant and nasty darkness. A darkness so bad that it forces a turn towards light. I doubt the future will be as glamorous as a Hollywood post apocalypse movie; there will be no Mad Max.

But darkness always summons light. A fact that darkness tends to forget in its angry hubris. While darkness may rule material it has no purchase elsewhere. Darkness shoots itself in the foot out of spite and bile. It seems human folly is to time and again embrace the falsehoods and sepsis of xenophobic fear and lust for power and dominion over other beings. It takes little for a soap-box would be fascist to embolden the crowds who are full of grievance. It takes less to pour petrol into the flames of those grievances. And so what starts as a smoulder can turn into conflagration.

The darkness is gathering…where is Frodo when you need him…