Land of discontent

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

There’s a great old movie from the late 1960s called “The Lion in Winter.” It has an excellent cast, including Peter O’Toole and Katherine Hepburn in the lead with a young Anthony Hopkins and Timothy Dalton in supporting roles.

The movie revolves around some royal melodrama surrounding King Henry II of England, his wife and their plotting sons as they all plot against one another on Christmas Eve 1183 as to who will ultimately control the vast British Empire. If you’re into the current melodrama surrounding the Royal Family of Great Britain, you’ll probably find this fictionalized account of real people to your liking (it also goes to show you how little has changed about that purported elite class of people has changed over the past thousand years).

I won’t spoil it for you, but it’s a great and quotable film. My

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favorite line, though, is when the haggard Queen Eleanor, after a brutal round of mental wrestling, with her estranged husband, the king, looks at him sorrowfully and asks, “How, from where we started, did we ever wind up here?”

It’s a deep thought-provoking question that can be applied to many situations, including several of the ones where we find ourselves as a nation today here in 2024, where a pair of octagenarians are set to battle for the highest office in the land and we would honeslty be better off without either of them. Or where we’re trying to banning books and changing laws to limit freedom instead of making sure everyone has food and shelter and health care? Or where party politics matter more than actually doing what’s best for the country.

How did we end up such a divided society, one where it’s “You’re either with me or against me!” taken to the nth degree?

I know we’ve always had our differences. That’s just how people work. But even in bitter divisive times, we’ve always acted, at least at the core, as one nation under God but I don’t know if I can say that now.

How did it go from our united nation to one where there’s not even a surface-level attempt at reaching across the aisle to work together? Has it always been this bad but it took the rise of social media to pull the wool from over our eyes. It doesn’t make sense.

But yet, here we are. It’s pretty sad to say the least.

For what it’s worth, King Henry and his family all eventually went to war with one another and within a generation there was a new royal family reigning over the British empire… that might be worth remembering.