A Reality Check

In the eighth to sixth centuries BC, prophets in little Palestinian villages and elsewhere proclaimed that in spite of the prosperity and progress of the time, sin was having a heyday.  This wrongdoing, unacknowledged and unrepented, they announced, would bring dire consequences. Their message was ignored, but in the course of time, their predictions seem to have come to pass and their countries annihilated.  Prophets appear in every age and every age ignores them.

Has anything really changed since the Druids?

Many centuries have passed since.  Has anything changed?  Human beings continue to be busy, “getting and begetting, fighting and defending, creating and destroying.”  The population has increased and we occupy every available place and now want to waste the far reaches of space.  We’ve raped the land, covering grass with asphalt, cutting ugly gashes in the mountains, killing off the wildlife, downing the forests, damming the rivers, wrenching out every available resource upon and beneath the earth and in the atmosphere above, besmearing the earth and the oceans with our waste and refuse.   The atmosphere has been contaminated.   Climate warming is a reality, but who cares? We’ve ignored, to the peril of our children, old neglected infrastructure which now fills the rivers of the land with poisonous lead and mercury and other harmful stuff.  It kills the fish and it may kill our great grandchildren. We’ve learned to communicate with each other instantaneously with new technologies, but still fail to communicate in ways that really matter. We traverse the world by land, sea, and air with regularity and still can’t fathom that we live in a global village.  

Many of us live comfortably while thousands die of starvation.  We’ve relegated some people to our old “left-over housing” in urban centers and complain because they don’t keep up their homes—homes which were already unlivable when they moved in.  We fight “enemies” we do not know and don’t want to know.  We develop fictitious reasons for fearing and hating them.  We lie, we cheat, we blame, and nobody seems to give a damn. We engage in angry dissensions over privilege, race, religion, policy, property, and  priorities.  Fear-mongering is being promulgated consciously and deliberately, leading the “fearful” to arm themselves with privately owned arsenals of AK-47’s.  The sown wind reaps the whirlwind.

An automobile with a front-end alignment problem causes the car’s tires to wear unevenly and eventually destroys them.  We are out of alignment.  The tires that have moved us along are now threadbare!