Do You Need a Clearer Sign That Civilization Is Coming to an End?

I'm not sure you could find a clearer sign. If you don't see it, it is because you are willfully NOT seeing it. Father of 3 killed in grocery store beating -- 3 teens arrested after 'laughing and enjoying themselves'

It wasn't a robbery, or revenge, it was a random act of violence. They wanted to kill someone, and they did.

The three young men allegedly engaged the victim, 53-year-old Donnie Smith, inside a Kroger grocery store, WSXY-TV reported.

The suspects were asked to leave by security after getting into an altercation with patrons inside the store, and then the fight continued outside, police said.

They were picking on anyone they could, and the settled on Mr. Smith.

Charging documents obtained by the local ABC station say Smith was “unconscious and bleeding from the head due to the beating” and that the group was “laughing and enjoying themselves” while assaulting him.

Smith died two weeks after the assault, the media outlet reported

Police arrested 18-year-old Dionta Hughes, 19-year-old Jamarion Evans-Bennett and 17-year-old Jayden Agee on charges of murder. (Hat tip to Breitbart.)

As these stories often do, these two stories have reminded me of the poem "The Second Coming," by William Butler Yeats. The entire text of the poem, it isn't long, can be found below (after the break). The part I always think of is...

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

Columbus is pretty much a Blue City. So Mr. Smith was apparently not armed for his own defense, and no one around him was armed either. Leftists hate the idea of self-defense. You are supposed to rely on the State for such things. Even though the State cannot provide them. Cops showed up eventually. Mr. Smith was taken to the hospital. It did not save his life.

I'm sure those Leftists are happy that no gun was used in this murder. Or I sure that they're happy about something.

Civilization was nice while it lasted.

The Second Coming
   — W. B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

It was written in 1919, after the First World War.