Twilight of the gods

In “Gone With The Wind,” Ashley Wilkes tells Scarlett O’Hara that they were witnessing a Gotterdammerung — a twilight of the gods. The Civil War, and the reconstruction that followed, swept away all he held dear. It was not so much the loss of property he lamented, but the loss of the golden dream world they had lived in. In a moment of insight, he realizes that those days of ease and splendor were not so splendorous for everyone.

A gentle man with a poet’s soul, Ashley Wilkes was nevertheless a plantation master. He owned the people who worked his land, kept his house, and had no control over their lives. An educated man who can buy, sell, and breed human beings might indeed consider himself a god.

In professor Mike Adams’ suicide, a man who held stridently bigoted views, I find myself wondering about other angry white men for whom the sky, it seems, is falling. Will they choose nothing if they can’t have everything? Have we come to an age of reckoning where greed, bias and arrogance are not as welcome as they once were?

The first requirement for a twilight of the gods is a god. When a diverse group of marchers calling for justice appears to you to be an unruly mob bent on destruction, consider. When you call in troops to shut down groups of protesters calling out for things you are not willing to share, consider. You must believe people deserve to be kept down to even have an uprising.

Jennifer Adams

Spokane