After the End of the World

Let us be serious, for a moment, about the end of the world.

Someday all life on earth will end, of course, because if for no other reason, the sun will collapse and become a red giant, and earth will fry like forgotten bacon. That will be four or five billion years from now. I will be about 4,500,000,079 years old by then. I won't care, or understand.

The people who do care--now--the people who genuinely believe, and hope, and fear that the world might end last Saturday, or next year, or whenever, are people who hurt. They despair, they want a better world than they have, they believe that, somehow, everything might be put right. They are the believers.

Maybe god will create a new heaven and a new earth. Surely the evildoers will suffer, finally! There must be justice, finally! There has to be justice. If there is a god, at all, there must be justice! There will be a new heaven and a new earth!

But there isn't. There never has been. There is this earth, and our own wishes for justice, and our own stupidity and cruelty and bad decisions and injustice.

When it gets really bad, if there is a shred of hope in us, we say--even if people think we are stupid--that there will be a new heaven and a new earth. There must be! If there is a god, at all, this cannot go on!

If there is a god. . . .

No one else planned it this way. It is up to us.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...

SmokeSound

Search This Blog