“The falcon cannot hear the falconer”

I’m dismayed by trends that I see both domestically and abroad.

I keep thinking, of late, about these lines from William Butler Yeats’s 1919 poem “The Second Coming”:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.