As I type this, it’s 8:44 am, and I just drove 30 minutes in 10 miles of pouring rain to start the week on 4 hours of sleep.
I went to bed about 11:30, but didn’t fall asleep until nearly 1am—very unusual for me. Like an overtightened bolt, I felt my corners round-off just a bit yesterday, the torque warping my mind just too much to sleep.
There’s much to consider, globally, nationally, and within my own hearth. Much I can do little about. Globally, there keeps being more of us, and our impact on the planet worsens by the year. Humans certainly seem less education, humane, and trustworthy than we did even 10 years ago. Perhaps my eyes are just open to our own debauchery, my naiveté burned away like so much slag from God’s refiner’s fire.
I can’t recall Donald Trump. I can’t unsay some of the things he’s said. I can generally watch in horror and pinch myself every time I hear the phrase “President-Elect” attached to his name.
I’ve found myself watching lots of post-apocalyptic films from my childhood. Stuff like the horrifying “The Day After” and the thrillers “Damnation Alley” and “By Dawns Early Light.” Any nuclear war scenario there is too horrible to contemplate, much like a Roman of 150 A.D. likely couldn’t comprehend the Dark Ages and Germanic Conquest. Like them, I’m not sure I’d want to survive to see the aftermath.
Theologically, I’m having tons of trouble with “The Problem of Evil”as it’s termed. Watching those movies I mentioned reminds me that we’re still yet roughly 45 minutes away from annihilating ourselves. Among hundreds of other atrocities we might commit, that an all-good (“omnibenevolent”) God would allow Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical weapons to exist boggles me. We could commit planetary suicide, and God seems powerless (unwilling?) to intervene.
Perhaps that was the plan all along, to create a sentient race of beings so broken they annihilate one another. Or, as The Bard put it:
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. (Macbeth V.5)
Other evils weigh, of course, from the car crash this weekend that claimed two pillars of my hometown community to my own family’s health issues. I’ve done my share of “Why, God?” questioning in the past few weeks.