I am reading Romeo and Juliet and the play is my text for today. Puzzling over love, the star-crossed couple concludes that Montague and Capulet are merely divisive words. They will gladly give them up if love, the value they exalt, can somehow take form. Today we need to gladly give up the nation, and for the same reason. Nations divide.

Progress

The only free entity on the globe is the human being. In most of his plays, Shakespeare strained at the limitations of the world. Today the Bard might present Trump as a comic harbinger of the end of nationalism.

It was clear in Shakespeare as it is also clear in the Gospels that for love to finally triumph no house can be left divided.

This would be the stage setting for the meal (see above) Trump missed. We would find him in an ante-room composing a tweet. We would naturally encounter verse:

America you will be great again,

And I shall best these sad pretenders then.

And he believes it. But the truth is not on his side.

Truth

The truth is that the world has always operated on values that can be expressed in the three words, Tolerance, democracy and helpfulness. They complement one another.

They lead to action. When accomplished and visible, these actions are true and beautiful at once. Most importantly, they fulfill the canons of true justice. They lead to the implementation of fairness as the basis for sustained unity.

Cynics

It has been the habit of cynics and nay-sayers to find and champion distinguished human beings who have picked at these values and the ideas they embody.

The position of Augustine in the pantheon of great thinkers has much to do with the fact that he justified and enabled the binary thinking that still divides the world between Christians and the rest of "them".

By suggesting the impossibility of a city of God on earth, he brought relief to the Trumps of the day, those who have forever thrived on the division as the basis for dominance and power.

Beyond tragedy

I think what Hamlet knew and could not say at the end of his frenetic life had to do with this matter.Allowing existence proceed minus tragedy. I think what Falstaff was about was much the same thing, allowing a bit of Philistinism to be accepted within the actual mix of what might prove a good life.

I am certain that it was what Jesus was about when in the context of ending division he brought Satan -- our imagination of evil, so we can avoid acknowledging our common freedom to do harm -- to an end.

We progress and now seems a moment of decision.
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