Informant38

I had a vision once, it was mountains all cold rocks and no trees, and a little path that dwindled even smaller, and a pass that was like a cleft, narrow, just enough room for the two men standing on either side and the hoop they held between them.
The hoop was a perfect circle and the color of the rainbow, a shimmering spectrum, it was alive and sort of spinning, though not in their hands which were steady, and they were calm and physically strong, like athletes, at rest but full of energy.
Stretching out down and away along the path up the mountain were all the people in the world. And each one had to go through that hoop individually to get to the other side. In the vision the other side wasn't the afterlife - it wasn't about death, it was about the future, about tomorrow, about going on.
There's a lot of talk about "moral relativism" and at the same time a lot of excusing of the past behaviors of men like Ratzinger, and it's coming from people who think of themselves as more or less at the center of things, normal, they're speaking from the heart of the big middle of being human.
What the vision seemed to be saying is that everyone who passed through would have that in common, and everyone who didn't would be gone.
Events that require cowardice and complicity in order to ensure survival create populations whose norms will eventually become complicitous and cowardly. It moves in such tiny increments it doesn't seem to move at all. But it does.
That makes the illusion - that it never changes - easier to maintain. And maintaining that illusion is a vital part of changing the human median. Because no one will worry about something happening they think can't.