Like Milton's Allegro, Mark Bernstein's "What Ended" has a companion. "What Had Begun" may yet be written. In that piece which may not be written but imagined, as in Milton's Il Penseroso, there can be spied a celebration of the power of words and story telling to truth tell and spell.

Till old experience do attain
To somthing like Prophetic strain

Dartmouth provides a Milton reading room
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/

Demystification and mystification pass by the same media. Not a city, not a dream, not a war. And not words. But the illusion that a certain substitution can work. In a careful reading, I imagine, Bernstein is calling for many to work again with words, work very hard with words, really hard with words like duty and responsibility. It is a strong line, a reassertion of the tenets of liberal democracy, that brings the invitation to examine the evidence back onto to the citizens who in the end "bear the weight of decision". What did not end has no need to begin again. But certainly need to be heard again.
Untwisting all the chains that ty
The hidden soul of harmony.