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Last night I read with great sadness that the Resource Center of the Americas had closed. Begun during the dark years of America's bloody intervention in Central America, the Resource Center has been a fount of information and a center of positive immigrant contact for nearly a generation. It seems that we are still living in a time of shrinking dreams and dwindling hope, a time when a smirking scion of privilege might still take us to war with the world, a time when people of conscience are afraid to act, a time when most people shut off the warnings of coming disaster and prefer to watch celebrities do naughty things on television. The Resource Center: closed. The Pulse: closed. The Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press: gelded and trivialized. The Republican Party: captive to superstition and greed. The Green Party: marginalized. The Democratic Party: impotent and fearful. Civil liberties: eroding. Our schools: commercialized, militarized, starved for resources and overwhelmed. Our health care system: on life support and fading fast. Our infrastructure: crumbling. Our national values of freedom and justice have been sold rather cheaply for a barrel of oil. Jesus has left the church to the moneychangers and the Bible is now a talisman raised to the skies to attract more money and stuff. The world is not ending, of course. As Martin Luther Kings once said, “The arc of history is long, but bends toward justice.” It is only that the darkness continues to deepen and we have still seen no sign of tomorrow's rising sun. Think of the embers that survive the exhausted flames. As our best institutions die and the light recedes, we must bank our fires, looking to see what quiet corner might preserve the hopes and goodness that we will need in the coming difficult days. This comment is cross-posted at http://www.mnblue.com/node/628