WHY THIS IS HAPPENING
"Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair."
Since my earliest childhood I have believed unfalteringly in two ideas: one, “He’s got the whole world in his hands,” and two, “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight.”
The main reason I left Christianity was that the Christians I knew were not acting like all God’s children were precious to him. My church had embraced the idea that there were certain groups whose children should be hated. Those groups were basically anyone who didn’t believe in the Calvinist concept of our evangelical Christian god, and gay people.
I didn’t lose my faith when I left Christianity. Instead I came to believe in a God who didn’t give a shit what his children believed. He just wanted us to take care of each other. The haves ministering to the have-nots. “What you have done for the least of these, this you have also done for me.” That kind of thing.
In that view, the world seemed like a place God set up to initiate us and teach us his way of Providence. Not that I believe in a personal God-man with a beard and robes and shit, but that the natural structures of the world seem to push us toward fascism, and our mission is to overcome that tendency by caring for each other, fighting for universal human rights and a society that provides for the basic necessities of all God’s children.
This design made sense to me. The re-election of the most depraved and disgusting human being I have ever seen in my life works according to this model. What saddens me, then, is the next administration’s plan to abandon our efforts to subdue or adapt to climate change. It looks like we’re going to spend the next four years, at least, going down the path of destruction as the “Drill, baby, drill” baby-king hijacks the American military and global economy to serve his personal agenda. Finally my faith in the first idea is faltering.
After the election, someone gave me the idea that when God wants something to break he puts it in the wrong hands.
This has me wondering, what does he want broken? There are plenty of earthly establishments that need to break, but climate change threatens to break everything. I know my perspective is too American, but I thought we were moving in the right direction. Maybe the game is over and the fascists have won this round.
Maybe God despises our half-assed efforts to share the blessings of humanity with all his children, and he’s starting us over.
Maybe he’s just turning up the heat on us, literally, like we’ve done well up to this point and it’s time to level up.
Maybe our wealth and technology and non-primitive understanding of the world have reached such a height that it takes an all-out existential threat to get us focused on what’s important.
All I have is conjecture and imagination at this point. And hope, I guess, and I’ll keep hoping for the best. Maybe we will live to see Trump and his ilk fail spectacularly, such that his legacy will be that of a modern Ozymandias—“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair”—and it’s time, finally, for the meek to inherit the earth.