Reconciliation: 23

Old sayings are just that, but some are true, like “The chickens will come home to roost.” I’m afraid we are due for some arrivals in this country. These comings home may not be pretty.

For example, I fear we will pay a price for our present obsession with violence. I often udpdate the lessons from Europe in the 1930s and 40s with my own status. To wit:

First, they came for people of color, but I’m white.

Then they came for the poor, but I’m white and male, meaning I was born with enough advantages that poverty was easy to avoid.

Then they came for the women who dared speak out, or take control of both their destinies and their bodies.

Now they are coming for news reporters. I’m not one, but my courage will be tested for I have friends who are, and I respect the profession. Will I stand tall when the time comes? I wonder. I even made up this little bit of doggerel to express my concern:

I can’t but wonder how brave I’ll be.

When they come for my friends, but not for me.

Oh, they’ll come for me eventually. They’ll even come for my friends who don’t share my political beliefs. You see, they are all good people who simply have a different view of governance, and good people will surely be on the list. Goodness and decency are so rare as to make headlines lately.

Another returning “chicken” will be the price we will pay for the coming annihilation of public education in our country. My darkest nightmare is a world like that described in The Time Machine, the 1895 novel written by H.G. Wells. In his imagined world, there exist, above ground, the gentle but clueless and helpless Eloi, food for the underground monsters, the Morlocks. It is a world reduced to ignorance and violence.

Why one of the richest families in our state, along with the owners of our only statewide newspaper and our present Secretary of Education, would seek a future of this sort is a mystery. Perhaps it would leave just enough room for computer operators and worker drones, along with the very rich and the mercenary warriors necessary to guard the belongings of the rich. Who knows?

I’m just glad I won’t be part of it.

In religion, I fear that, in this country, we will pay a price for the abandonment, by so many, of the Social Gospel in favor of the Prosperity Gospel. The life and words of the Gentle Galilean can be twisted into a powerful and destructive tool by the greedy and uncaring.

We are seeing now the beginnings of the chickens of “hate media” coming home to roost. Those with any knowledge of history are increasingly horrified.

But why worry? The planet is going, by all current indications, to get us first. That chicken isn’t coming home to roost. It is coming home to exact the Sixth Extinction.

Oh, and have a nice Sunday.