#RevTread # 140
Scary Time
1/I’ve spent the past two weeks watching the impeachment hearings and reading an article appearing on Motherboard by Nafeez Ahmed about a report by the Army entitled, “Implications of Climate Change on the U. S. Army”.
Scary Time
1/I’ve spent the past two weeks watching the impeachment hearings and reading an article appearing on Motherboard by Nafeez Ahmed about a report by the Army entitled, “Implications of Climate Change on the U. S. Army”.
2/Watching the crass and stupid Trump family and Party careen out of control as the entire GOP degrades itself before our eyes in the hour of our peril has been alarming. All the known life of the universe is threatened by bottomless greed.
3/“Fear not,” is the usual greeting of angels to humans in the Bible. I guess they’re pretty imposing, though I’ve never had one talk to me. The word “angel” just means “messenger”.
4/Why are we sometimes scared if someone comes with a message? Phone calls from a family member late at night are generally pretty dreadful. Getting lab results can be pretty tense.
5/Here’s another kind of message that is deeply scary: finding out that something or even someone we trusted is not what or who we thought. A minister or a political party, a spouse or a company we work for is suddenly revealed to be fraudulent...
6/.. and we recognize that we’ve been fooled. That is not only fearful; it’s enraging. Usually our first response is: “I don’t believe it.”
7/The closer to our hearts and to our belief systems the betrayal, the harder it is to deal with. The parent who gets revealed as a cheater, the president we trusted who turns out to be a crass crook, the church we joined that is hiding secrets --these truths are hard to accept.
8/ It’s really embarrassing to learn you've been conned.
9/ How come? “I’ve been a dope”” is an unwelcome insight. As for me, I’ve been going along now for ¾ of a century. I’m a white guy, grew up in almost all white schools, and had no idea that I was carrying around all kinds of racist assumptions.
10/God sent me an African American roommate when I was 20, and just living with him introduced me to the reality that I did not know anything real about millions and millions of my fellow Americans.
11/Later, ministering away, I would discover other vast areas of my ignorance: some of the nicest people in my congregations were doing the damnedest things. The mask of niceness easily fools me.
12/And I discovered something else -- lots of “my” people know way more about living with God than I do. All this knowledge -- the real stuff, the stuff way more important than information -- involved the painful recognition of my dumbness.
13/And all this life-knowledge helped me grow. Without, “I’ve been wrong”, I cannot learn and grow in the areas that matter most in life -- compassion, mercy and justice. Right now millions among us are struggling with this suspicion: “I’ve been wrong.”
14/Hell, we’re all struggling with it. I was wrongly and naively assuming that a fast-talking grifter with no experience in leadership and a lifetime of brazen immorality could never be nominated and elected President...
15/... I needed to get rid of the delusion that we are an exceptional nation. Clearly we’re as capable of being seduced by an autocrat as any other nation.
16/A deeper struggle--one lots of our fellow citizens are too scared to acknowledge--involves facing two realities: their vote in 2016 deeply wounded our country; and throughout the world, humans as consumers now imperil all the known life in the universe.
17/I’m really scared. I love the earth and America and lots of humans. So it’s time to turn towards the light. Listen in.
18/The last time we inflicted this much spiritual damage on the country, the wise and good President Lincoln called us to have malice towards none and charity towards all, and to bind up the wounds of the nation, by caring tenderly for the wounded soldier and his widow.
19/ Lincoln had faced his own truths and the deep evil of his time, and grown. Those who could not grow reimposed white supremacy for another century, lynching and scapegoating and excluding with all their strength...
20/..But none of the violence that arose from the refusal to face what was wrong inside could silence the power of Lincoln’s words or example.
21/ So, following Lincoln's example, let us muster what compassion we can for those who have soiled themselves in the waste that is Trumpism.
22/Understand that some will never be able to say, “I was wrong” and will simply prolong their cherished but imaginary grievances, and steadfastly refuse to grow. And let us welcome gladly those who can say, “I made a mistake.” We are all going to need each other.
23/You may have seen a little story about some expert who tried to present to the President a report on climate change and that the President’s staff refused to show him the report because it would just upset the President too much.
24/Turns out that the expert was General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Google “The Implications of Climate Change for the U.S. Army.” The article about this report appears on Motherboard.
25/The report states that the US Army believes that it could collapse within 20 years, that the 600,000,000 people living at sea level will be forced to migrate, that the power grid will collapse within the next 20 years...
26/.. that potable water will be unavailable to vast populations, that within 30 years temperatures>125 F will be common and lethal in the absence of electricity and that correspondingly severe winter storms, hurricanes and tornadoes will bedevil the last generation.
27/All this impends at a moment when our leader is a gruesome gangster supported by a GOP that has become a corrupter of souls. Watching the GOP in these hearing I felt their sadism, their endless greed, their vicious rudeness. Their cruelty was breathtaking.
28/The careful, accurate testimony of honorable witnesses, and the care and decency and clarity of the Democrats was not enough to budge a single Republican out of their determined depravity.
29/Not a single Republican will vote for impeachment, and the Senate trial will be a farce. As disgraced as they are, they cohered enough to protect our terrible president.
30/I pray for what our ancestors used to call a great awakening. Our only hope is to cherish one another and the good earth.
31/God is not some angry old white guy up in the sky. God is the source of all the vitality in existence.
32/God is the giver of life and of this fragile earth, our island home. And we are about to sacrifice all that life on the altar of nihilistic greed.
33/ Listen to St. Francis and embrace simplicity, poverty and gratitude.
34/And -- oh yeah -- vote these suckers out of power.
