What Is To Come

I think we are all of us ill prepared for what is to come and I don't care what shape it takes.  And whatever comes my guess is that it will have small power to sustain us.  These old people I talk to, if you could of told em that there would be people on the streets of our Texas towns with green hair and bones in their noses speakin a language they couldn't even understand, well, they just flat out wouldn't of believed you.  But what if you'd told em it was their own grandchildren?

Well, all of that is signs and wonders but it dont tell you how it got that way.  And it dont tell you nothin about how it's fixin to get, neither.  Part of it was I always thought I could at least someway put things right and I guess I just dont feel that way no more.  I don't know what I do feel like.  I feel like them old people I was talkin about.  Which aint goin to get better neither.  I'm being asked to stand for something that I dont have the same belief in I once did.  Asked to believe in somethin that I dont have the same belief in I once did.  That's the problem.  I failed at it even when I did.  Now I've seen it held to the light.

Seen any number of believers fall away.  I've been forced to look at it again and I've been forced to look at myself.  For better or worse I do not know.  I dont know that I would even advise you to throw in with me, and I never had them sorts of doubts before.  If I'm wiser in the ways of the world it come at a price.

County Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in Cormac McCarthy's, No Country For Old Men.  The prophetic novel was written in 2005, set in 1980, and descriptive of today's world.