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You may remember the old cartoon. A funny old bearded man walking along wearing a sandwich-board sign saying ”The End is Near” or something like that. It was a cartoon, a joke. No one took it seriously. In the optimistic world of fifty or a hundred years ago, only a few crazies seriously thought civilization would ever fall apart. 

Not a joke anymore. Anyone who looks around at environment disorder, political tensions, culture changes, public health, population displacements, the arms race, famines, trash accumulation everywhere, the world. We certainly ought to think twice before laughing. at that old man.

We don’t know exactly what Eliot was thinking when he talked about the end, but we do know that he had little faith that a better world was coming.  Hollow men (you and me) didn’t promise much, and we really don’t know what to expect. Will our end be a nuclear catastrophe started by an errant or even intentional missile? Or will one failure bring another then another until the whole system shudders to a halt? Will it be a bang or a whimper? And what of those fragments from the Lord’s Prayer before the final stanza? What was Elliot saying?  What does lie ahead?