Advent is Upon Us

The advent of what, one might ask.
Of course, the Advent season has begun and Christmas is in the air, or at least in the hearts and minds of believers. It is safe to say, though, that Christmas has been ostracized from the debased air that falls across the land of good and plenty.
It will soon be a hate crime to wish anyone a merry Christmas, so let me say it loud and clear before they take me away in the interests of national security,

While imagining that glorious first Christmas in far away Bethlehem, I was reminded of another expected coming, the second coming as the poet put it. During these perilous days, as our once great republic totters on the edge of the abyss and evil daily rears its ugly head all about us, it is this second coming we all need to fear. Take it as a warning like a mournful fog horn in the misty night that envelopes us...werewolf weather indeed.

William Butler Yeats and The Second Coming:
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 the Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the 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?
*    *   *

What rough beast? There is only one beast we need be concerned with. The question is: when its day comes, will we be prepared?