Friday, July 20, 2012

All the air has escaped the football

It is 5 a.m as I begin this tome. I've been up since 4:15. Not awake, but up. I've been awake all night. Don't know why, as usual, but it did storm enough to upset the dogs, with popping thunder and boisterous lightening for a royal night-light.

With my dear wife, Mary, in Woodworth, La., for a United Methodist women's four-day meeting, I've been alone with the dogs and feline warriors. Mary's love, Breesy, the dauschand who normally does not like me much (hate, hate, and more hate), loved me so much last night with the storm approaching he timidly walked up the steps to the bed and slept lying next to me, snarling something about loving the one you're with.

I tell you all that to tell you this: I got up, made coffee, and went to the Internet to read some good early morning news rather than stare at the frequently lit ceiling. What I got instead was news that was flat-out disturbing. Just when I thought CBS' television show Criminal Minds, which is about the FBI's behavioral unit profilers (think serial criminal per week), couldn't get any dumber, any weirder, any staler, sordid life took over, matching and unfortunately surpassing fiction.

Let's take a few stories in order of my reading.
1) As of this minute, there are 14 dead after a whack-job opened fire at a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises in a Denver suburb theater. At least 50 others, as of this writing, were injured. Someone bought a ticket, collected his weapons went to the movies, combining the Batman and a ruthless, murderous very real and deadly joker.
2) Police have linked three July stabbings of homeless people in the Los Angeles area to one suspect who left typewritten "death warrant" notes at each crime scene. The third signed letter was found at a stabbing early Thursday morning in Hollywood and was similar to letters found at two previous stabbings in downtown and Santa Monica, Police Cmdr. Andrew Smith said. Police are asking for the public's help in finding a person of interest. All three victims are in their 50s and were stabbed in the back in the early morning hours as they slept, Smith said. The victims survived, though one remains hospitalized, police said.
3)They're blowing up Israelis for no reason other than they are Jews. Incredibly, that's not the news. What is news is they're doing it all over the world, relishing being able to feed on their hatred in countries other than Israel. Iran, the apparent villain, is going to the trouble of finding Israeli tourists and killing them as they have the audacity of living and vacationing at the same time. Hate exists like grains of sand in the Middle East, and it blows hither and yon, landing on whom it will. The answer? Somebody has to take revenge. Somebody always has to seek revenge, mind you. When the shrieks of the dying are more prevalent than the cries of the newborn, life isn't life. Existence in those areas is like the moments you put your hands over your eyes while watching a slasher flick. It is not life, it is survival at its most difficult.

I could go on and on, but I need more coffee and less messy thoughts.

We talk alot about fixing our problems in this country. Yet the world circles and circles the sun and nothing EVER changes. We invent and we innovate and we make it easier to make it easier and yet, and yet dadgumit, nothing EVER changes. The biases change, but the reasons for the biases never does. And we certainly never FIX the problem.

As an example, we have two presidential candidates, the country is falling apart at least economically and the only thing our candidates and the parties they represent want to do is ravage the other guy.

Do either have a clue about fixing anything? Nope. Do we have an idea about how to make things better? Nope. Don't be fooled. Neither has something called a workable idea. Neither.

They're just certain the other guy will do even less than they will. Nothing EVER changes. Both sides are convinced the policies that they've evoked for three decades are the ones that we must try again. So we plaster together some old parts and tell anyone who will listen that THIS TIME the plane will fly. And Icarus flies too close to the sun every time and his wings ignite every time and he falls to his death every time and every single crappy time losing is the only reward for those gullible enough to watch the plane rumble and belch down the condemned runway.

So, let's be sure and try it again, and this time let's cry out for change we know won't happen.

The badness that runs rampant still is running rampant. The sadness is still sad. The madness still mad, and the joker screams, "Why so serious?" as our scars begin to bleed again.

Bad gets worse simply because every leader we know is more interested in their own attempt at the flight. Would getting together for a legitimate attempt to fix the dang plane, the dang runway, the dang engine, the dang ANYTHING, be so bad?

I know, I know that followers of the Way, those persons we've called little Christs or Christians since there was some sort of tent revival down Antioch way a couple thousand years ago, will win in the end. I've read the previews in that book called Revelation from that living, breathing Word of God.

But till the end comes, till our brother Jesus stretches a couple of toes out of well-worn sandals and proudly puts them back onto the world his Daddy created by simply making a sound, till the Christ comes again, returning to a world that is crumpling like a teenager's first car fender in the heat of this modern idea of hell, till the Galilean fills the sky and instantly changes morbid night into slap-happy day, we're like Paul, beaten, banged up and looking for a bit of thorny flesh relief.

We're losing our children to culture wars we haven't figured how to start to battle.
We're losing our seniors to our financial spending wars of the past 30 years.
We've lost the good ol' days, and Andy and Barney are where we long to be.
We've lost space, never going where no man has gone before.
Truth is, we've lost the most important thing possible in the process. We've lost hope, it dying somewhere down this long, lonesome highway, while we partied with the newly 401-K free, pension lost retirees.

Heck, our homeless have to suffer not only having no place to lay their tired and dirty heads to sleep at night but also suffer from real, solid icy fear that can't be negated by all the locks on hearts and doors in existence. Safety stopped being safe 40 years ago when the lights went out in Mayberry, when the lillys were gilded in Petticoat Junction and those hillbillies in Beverly HIlls lost their hedge tfunds.

The sun still is trying to find its way into the already steamy sky this morning, rising like water-less lakebeds in the midwest of our land. Hopelessness is driving some beast called a hybrid to a job that pays half what it used to for gas that costs four times what it used to.

A man in his 80s says it's halftime in America, but we know he won't see the fourth quarter and it really, really wouldn't matter if he did. The football has lost all its air.

So... Dirty Harry, go ahead and tell everyone the right message: Last one to leave, turn the lights out. Motel 6 just went out of business, like all the others. Too many murders behind their closed doors.

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