If sales are any indication, the Stones tapped into a truth about how fragile civilization is. Here are the lyrics to one of their most well-known and enduring songs, and one of my enduring favorites:

Oh, a storm is threat’ning
My very life today
If I don’t get some shelter
Oh yeah, I’m gonna fade away

War, children, it’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away
War, children, it’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away

Ooh, see the fire is sweepin’
Our very street today
Burns like a red coal carpet
Mad bull lost your way

War, children, it’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away
War, children, it’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away

Rape, murder!
It’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away
Rape, murder!
It’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away
Rape, murder!
It’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away

The floods is threat’ning
My very life today
Gimme, gimme shelter
Or I’m gonna fade away

War, children, it’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away
It’s just a shot away

I tell you love, sister, it’s just a kiss away
It’s just a kiss away
It’s just a kiss away
It’s just a kiss away
It’s just a kiss away
Kiss away, kiss away

The tune, of course, is “Gimme Shelter,” written by the Rolling Stones and released on their 1969 album Let It Bleed. The album reflected the times’ cultural upheavals–Vietnam, drugs, feminism, the breakdown of the traditional family, no-fault divorce, “free love,” and the fallout and ruin that still reverberate into our day.

This morning when I perused the news headlines online, it could have been the late 1960s again. I was met with article after article, and photo after photo, revealing a cultural nihilism. Nihilism is the worldview that nothing objective underlies human values. Literally, the word means “nothing” (nihil) + “system” (ism). Truth is gone; values are gone; and of course, man is gone. It’s the natural outworking of atheism/secularism. Man is a “useless passion,” as Sartre wrote.

And what you see in the West is a culture that has largely cast off restraint, denied God, and embraced juvenile ideas of human autonomy. You’re seeing the results.

I had to laugh at one of the headlines that revealed the insanity of contemporary times. Woke mobs were whining that crash test dummies revealed sexism because the dummies used were male. Yup. For a generation that is so woke, so muddleheaded that it denies the realities of gender in one breath, but then complains that crash test dummies are not diverse enough because women aren’t equally represented, I had to laugh. Otherwise, I would not have been able to bear it.

But wait. I thought gender was just a construction? To say that female is a gender would be sexist, right? See. This is the level of buffoonery and monkeyshines replete in a culture when man worships himself. He is given over to a mind that cannot think as it ought.

The Stones had it right: “Gimme Shelter.” Why? Because intellectual children are constructing hells here on earth. Gimme shelter, indeed.