At Sunset: Mark Dankof’s Night Thoughts on New Year’s Eve 2023

It is late night on New Year’s Eve in San Antonio, Texas. I hear the explosions of fireworks in the distance. The sound of a freight train at I-35 and Walzem Road a few miles away reverberates in the distance, as its warning horn announces its approach to those thinking of crossing the tracks via car or pickup truck traveling either east or west across the railroad track paralleling I-35 as a north to south route of high speed transit. As Midnight approaches and a New Year dawns, the sounds in the darkness will reach a more intrusive crescendo only to fade away in the initial hours of 2024.

Linear time travels with incessant acceleration in speed as one continues life’s path in this present but dying cosmos. Consciousness of this takes the mind back decades in time before the gears of the mind switch from reverse to forward and destinations both uncertain and foreboding in a mere nocturnal instant.

I am reminded that 56 years ago today, I witnessed the greatest and most dramatic American professional football game ever played in the most adverse weather conditions on the gridiron ever experienced before or after December 31st, 1967. It was only yesterday (Psalm 90; 2 Peter 3:8) that I was 12 years old and in the 7th grade, experiencing my first Middle Western winter after 3 years in Hawaii.

There is another reminder of the past has passed like a watch in the night. My Mother passed away in Hospice in San Antonio on December 4th. Good times still outweighed the challenges until a fall in her apartment on Good Friday. Several hospitalizations with interim sessions in Skilled Nursing Rehabilitation were followed by entrance into Hospice in June on the 82nd anniversary of her marriage to my Father. I thought no more than 2-3 weeks would conclude the last chapter of her life in this dying world. She lasted almost 6 months, passing on my 30th wedding anniversary.

I am reminded again that the America she and Dad represented, like that of Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry, died a long time ago. Like her husband and both of these gridiron leviathans, she was a Christian, passing through the increasingly dark and evil character of a 21st century post-Christian Western world into the presence of Jesus Christ in the Kingdom of God (Romans 10:9; Revelation 2: 9-10). For the believer, this is the final destination after penultimate developments before the end of history.

My final thoughts on the last night of the Year of our Lord are entirely penultimate and eschatological. The Zio-American Empire is in the process of God’s judgment.

The Russian Eurasian philosopher and political commentator Alexander Dugin agrees. He recently wrote the following for English language readers:

📣 The big war will come to Middle East.

⚫️ May be a bit later, but it will.

⚫️Houthis will not stop. Ships will not enter any more Red Sea.

⚫️The oil prices will go up. Iran will respond to provocations.

⚫️Collapse of Israel is inevitable. Call it as you wish. We call it end time agenda. Apocalypsis it is now. Right now or a bit later.

⚫️May be not yet.

⚫️But soon.

Alexander Dugin 🇷🇺

My final thoughts are of Christ’s admonition in the Olivet Discourse which hauntingly mirror Dugin’s 2000 years later: Watch. And Wait.