on these faces there are no smiles

A zinger of a commentary that ultimately should make you uncomfortable.
Gazing upon the ruins of Timgad in North Africa, a city founded as Thamugas by the emperor Trajan in 100 a.d., and destroyed by the Vandals after it had lost its cultural balance, Hilaire Belloc wrote: “We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.”
(The "Massachusetts Senator" in question is Gerry Eastman Studds, a gay, Democratic Senator for 24 years, reelected even after it was found he'd had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old Senate page in '73. He died recently, and I, too, noted the factual error that the articles written about him containing the words, "his husband.")

Or maybe it shouldn't make you feel uneasy. With everything that's going on, it's harder to pretend like it's okay to be a nihilistic sheep. And hey, ultimately, that's a good thing, at least for me personally. Western culture might be too far gone, though.

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