From Wikipedeia re Yeats' Second Coming

The lines "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity" can be read as a paraphrase of one of the most famous passages from Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, a book which Yeats, by his own admission, regarded from his childhood with religious awe:

In each human heart terror survives
The raven it has gorged: the loftiest fear
All that they would disdain to think were true:
Hypocrisy and custom make their minds
The fanes of many a worship, now outworn.
They dare not devise good for man's estate,
And yet they know not that they do not dare.

I worry, but not too much, about being a cynical and embittered old man. Web surfing, tv watching, and news reading have led me to feel near to despair. Our brothers and sisters suffer intensely at the hands of the most rapacious few and statesmen do not intervene or even seem to notice, as they rely on the diversion of a small fraction of a percent of those greedy few's annual income to fund their public relations efforts. And the public relations effort, does it serve to inform or educate the electorate? Only so far as to convince thirty plus per-cent of the voters that this candidate is, at worst, the best of a sorry lot.

But I won't despair, because it was a simple accident that I was born to be a person who was given the time and education to ponder our situation. I've asked myself why was I not born an indentured slave in an Indian stone quarry, a Chinese peasant farmer, an Ethiopian goat herder or a Bolivian miner? If we strip away the accident of birth and I lived a life of hard labor and desperate poverty, I would know that despair is a luxury I can not afford, and that given nothing else I have only God. If I could not provide welfare or even assure the survival of my chidren, I would stare into the eyes of God every day and learn that He expects me to know that what matters is my relationship to Him, and that I need be a humble supplicant.

The human comforts we enjoy in our time and place are a pleasant distraction, but should we not be staring into the eyes of God and receiving the same message? Does the accident of our birth really alter the metaphysics? If the four horsemen crash down upon us and we lose all that separated us from the others, would we lose ourselves, would we lose our God?

I remind myself not to worry over what to require from this broken world, or from broken people. And I remind myself that in God's eye my fretful pondering is another self-indulgence and another distraction. I'll try to elevate myself to humble supplication.