The blood-dimmed tide

Sixty civilians huddling in a basement get murdered (there is, frankly, no other word for it) when Israeli shells hit the building in Qana. Condi Rice gets rebuffed by the Lebanese and heads home with her tail between her legs. Kofi Annan calls the UN Security Council to call for an immediate cease-fire (I predict a US veto on that).

Yeats' poem "The Second Coming" never seemed more apt:

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 convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Indeed, "The best lack all convictions, while the worst [a]re full of passionate intensity."