In his letter of 2/24, Bill Bunker has truly outdone himself in histrionics and Chicken Little arm (wing?) waving. As he charts his way through the social contemporary waters, Mr. Bunker finds little he likes: Canada, ideologues, corporations, billionaires, the press, Silicon Valley. Whew! Mr. Bunker must be exhausted by the end of a day of stuff he doesn’t like. I’m surprised Mr. Bunker didn’t quote the poet W.B. Yeats who penned the following line in “The Second Coming,” “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”
Of course, Yeats was describing a devastated Europe after WWI and the chaos surrounding the Irish war for independence, not to mention a pandemic flu that killed millions of people, clearly a conversion of forces that would make one feel put upon. Mr. Bunker, on the other hand, is commenting from his usual playbook of hyperbole, negativity, insult and name-calling that does nothing to heal our hearts or souls. At a time when we need to cling to something positive after 2 years of confinement, fear, desperation, sorrow and loss, Mr. Bunker gives us Debbie Downer and the End of Days. If his purpose is to depress us, he has succeeded wonderfully. Me? I prefer John Keats’s perhaps overly optimistic final line in “Ode to the West Wind,” “If winter comes, can spring be far behind.” Clearly, Keats never lived in New England, but you have to agree his heart is in the right place.
Chuck Annal
Concord