No amount of guns, assault-style or otherwise, is protection enough from any authoritarian form of government, masquerading as a democracy, if said government is able to pinpoint a target’s location via smartphone activity and serve notice with a Reaper drone. If nothing else, the Wikileaks revelations, courtesy of the great Julian Assange, should have enlightened every American of this reality. War has become a video game; people nothing but exploding specks of dust, killed via remote control. #freejulianassange
The same neo-liberal and neo-conservative factions of the US/Western power and money structure are reacting to the Russian invasion of Ukraine as they did to Trump’s electoral victory in 2016. Disbelief has been followed by overreaction and escalation. Why? Because neither event fits the historical narrative of big “P” Progress. The election of a “rich, racist and misogynist” white man should not have followed a two-term presidency of the likes of Obama. Similarly, neither invasions nor wars should be waged in and by countries populated mostly by white people anymore. They are “supposed” to be fought in countries that have little or no market value, by people with darker skins who have little or no worth.
“[Today,] people find it difficult to acknowledge the justice and goodness of…[a] higher power when the world is so obviously full of evil. They find it difficult to reconcile their expectations of worldly success and happiness, so often undone by events, with the idea of a just, loving, and all-powerful creator. Unable to conceive of a God who does not regard human happiness as the be-all and end-all of creation, they cannot accept the central paradox of religious faith: that the secret of happiness lies in renouncing the right to be happy.” — ChristopherLasch, “The Soul of Man Under Secularism”
“What democracy requires is rigorous debate, not information. Of course, it needs information too, but the kind of information it needs can be generated by debate. We do not know what we need to know until we ask the right questions, and we can identify the right questions only by subjecting our own ideas about the world to the test of public controversy. information, usually seen as the preconditions of debate, is better understood as its byproduct. When we get into arguments that focus and fully engage our attention, we become avid seekers of relevant information. Otherwise we take in information passively — if we take it in at all.” — Christopher Lasch, “The Lost Art of Argument”
When did funerals become parties, fake lives celebrated, and deaths not mourned? Have we become so giddy with our times that we now exclude any discourse regarding the rewards and power of suffering? The need for regrets? The divine nature of sin? Or how about hell?
Have we become so thoroughly secularized that we automatically assume — to paraphrase Patti Smith — that if Jesus died for anyone’s since, they weren’t ours?
Make no mistake about it: I’m a sinner. And I hope that this Lent I can redeem myself, at least a little bit, in the eyes of God. Like so many of us, I often think and physically feel that I am painfully paying for my sins by merely living as I do. Purgatory via a thousand tiny cuts. For me, personally, with every bird or other animal I see dead, or experience firsthand dying or suffering…a small part of my soul is lost. I’m convinced of that.
Socrates once suggested that an unexamined life was not worth living. But if we are dying every day, mustn’t we also question the readiness of our souls? Shouldn’t we be wondering how prepared we are to pass through Heaven’s Gate, particularly if we heed Christ’s words about the narrowness of the pathway there?
I’m convinced that no matter how good we like to think or believe we are — how Christ-like we’ve managed to pattern our lives — when our embalmed self is lying face up in the casket of our choice, we will be begging for prayers, not accolades. Because we will have honestly tallied those instances that jeopardized our souls. And we will sense how the Grandest of Inquisitors has judged us, finding our presumed best lacking.
Aren’t we all, then, the walking wounded? Zombies of a different sort? Our confessions but mere maggots on sores that never truly heal. Not in a century or more that reads as if Lucifer has been given free reign.
Two abortions. Two murders. On my conscience. The first was thoughtless. Never second-guessed what my girlfriend at the time and I assumed was the best for both of us. For the “fetus.” The best option. The best choice. The beautiful thing about Roe — as far as men are concerned — is that it lets us off the hook. The ultimate responsibility falls on the woman for the killing. We can only be accomplices to the crime. To the murder. And while at the time I never sought comfort in that, I can’t claim that I didn’t later. Because when I truly bothered to look into the eyes of whom would have been the mother of our child, I saw nothing but regret. But acknowledging such a thing would have also called my conscience into question. Should I have done — could I have done — anything to change her mind, without making her decision even more difficult to bare?
The same questions arose the second time. But again were never posed. Because this time I pushed against what had already been decided. I begged for her to adopt out the baby. My conscience screamed, demanding to be heard. For by now I had begun sorting out the so-called big questions. There was no longer any ambivalence regarding the morality of abortion. No gray area. No shading of equivocation. It was wrong. But I also felt that the more I pushed on her, the worst she felt. Not about her decision — which she was firmly committed to — but about me. What kind of man was I to “force” my “point of view” on her? She had a right to do what I believed was wrong. And she did.
The worst part of this second case was how little we ever said to each other about it. Fifteen years of marriage. Maybe neither of us wanted to make the other feel bad. Quite the trade-off. I probably never gave that horrible day as much thought as I needed to. I’m certain that I didn’t pray enough about it. And I never formally asked God for His forgiveness until very recently. But I do now; I do so many times a day.
So when I die, please no celebrations. No memorials. Just prayers. Prayers that beg God to forgive me for all of the other sins that I never had a chance to account for in my short stay here. Prayers that purge. So that I may indeed rest in peace with Him. Much sooner than later.
