See the gold catch fire? Embers are filling the air, but you can touch them as they float down from the trees. Cold fire. No smoke. Happens every fall. The leaves lose their grip on the branches, signaling Nature’s congregations that it’s time to quit worshipping in the Gold Cathedral of summer and sing the anthems of the Rose Cathedral of autumn.

The transition is a paradigm shift, a perspective that appears only momentarily, like the mystic village of Brigadoon here and gone in a day. It moves from general to specific, so I stare at the starry, starry night and try to think macrocosmically. As I’ve expressed it elsewhere, something like this:

I am a speck of life, capable of grasping a speck of truth. So are you. It all started after the Big Bang when the cosmic web first began to ignite with suns. We came from those stars and we feed on complex sugars triggered by light from our mediocre home sun. The feast will end someday. Day? A very local term. What’s a day anywhere else in this universe? But we are past the main course in the feast of suns. The 400 billion stars in our one-of-three trillion galaxies in this one universe will eventually turn out their lights. The final red dwarfs will fade to black. And if matter and energy are indestructible but interchangeable, where will we be then? Scattered back to cosmic dust? But what was before that Big Bang? I love the fact that science breaks down into unscientific paradoxes. Will we ever be warm matter again? Will we think again? Will we ponder and marvel and share our rudimentary specks of truth? In this tiny fragment of time given to our human species on the planet Earth, it’s like musical chairs. What a shame to waste it pushing and shoving in discord. I think I’ll just play with whoever is making the music and watch.

And that leads me to the microcosm, the here and now of 2022. Can you hear the hum? Or has it come over us so slowly that it doesn’t consciously register?  Imagine yourself immersed in the world of a social insect – like a bee in a hive. That kind of hum. Resonating a mono-note of single-mindedness, all in tune, existing for the collective will of the hive. In human terms, the will of the State. A place where the logic and insight of perspective are drugged by the seductive hum of emotions. The human hum is electronic. I.e., cell phones, tablets, computers, TV, films, DVDs, streaming, platforms, e-print, et al – cultural persuasion writ large across the blackboards and screens of education, entertainment and information. Writ in the runes of a simplistic synthesis, namely, fictions and truths mixed together like artificial food coloring and pure water. In short, media.

And the message? It’s very simple, really. Listen to the bees, the social insects. The hum – the one-note message: sameness. None of that stuff of individualism, opportunity, working harder than anyone else, ambition, creativity, taking one’s talents to the limit, self-reliance, resourcefulness, competition, incentive, personal responsibility, freedom. Social insects are 100% about equity. Forget the founding American value known as equality of opportunity. Equality of outcomes, that’s the new hum. Bees don’t need opportunity. They don’t pursue individual lives. They have guaranteed equality of outcomes because they exist for the good of the State as a whole. Unthinkable that the hive would have three branches of governance…unless they were all of the same mind. They would censor/cancel/cleanse any individual not politically aligned with the single Party of the hive.

Sameness. In the world of Muggles, we call that equity. Sounds ideal to me…providing you don’t achieve it by lowering standards, weighting test scores, favoritism through quotas, preferences like “affirmative action,” demonizing the meritocracy, undermining law enforcement, removing consequences for crime, making criminals into victims, and empowering the lowest common denominators. Isn’t that what we’ve been promoting for decades now? Is that really compassion? Has it worked? Is anyone fooled by a participation trophy? Does chopping off the last half mile of a mile-long race make us all sub-4-minute milers? Could it be that lowered expectations don’t motivate?

We are not bees, we are humans, individuals with dormant capacities that require incentive to be awakened. High expectations and high standards are critical. Yet, all over the country, public schools are removing honors courses, calling it “de-leveling” (demoting, lowering) curriculums as part of Critical Race Theory. In Barrington, Rhode Island, a student activist against those moves was messaged by his teacher: “I do take offense to you invading my classroom space … your methods verge on criminal … watch your back.” We’ve gone from promoting success to lowering the bar, and this is the great divide in our society. We are already into official voting for the direction of the nation. It may be your last meaningful say in a two-party system, because if the White House and Congress remain in single party control, it isn’t just flooding the border or packing the Supreme Court that will eventually “de-level” our checks and balances, it’s packing/flooding the electoral college. Changing voting laws and granting statehood to areas like Washington DC and Puerto Rico, or splitting up California, as has been proposed, would swing the electoral college in favor of radical socialism – permanent dependency. 57% of our adult population paid no Federal Income Tax in 2021, and together with the 15% of the population working in some way for government, we will certainly become a permanent one-party electorate. That may be good news for you. Or not. But the choices have never been starker. Whichever way you vote, please understand that this is not a one-issue election. You are choosing between two countries: the free-market, incentive-driven one of laws that brought us to the dance or a rubber stamp dependency we’ve had for the last two years kept in power by the socialist hum of the hive.

A dozen photos usher in autumn: #1-9 the many moods of Elm Creek and Crow-Hassan (Three Rivers parks). #10-12 a trio of ancient photographs from my teen years at “the Gypsy camp” on Elizabeth Lake -- Wampus, Pat and moi (Treesqueak). You think air guitar is fun? This was air badminton. Actually, the camera couldn’t pick up the speed of the rackets, but the girls are swinging them, and whenever we left a birdie hung up in the trees, we’d just wait for a slow sparrow to fly low through the yard.

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan