woensdag 16 maart 2016

WHAT GOD HATH WROUGHT


"What God hath wrought."   It's a verse from the Book of Numbers (23:23) in that strange and foreign and surely un-American book which Jews and Christians supposedly live by. 


                                        
                                  WHAT GOD HATH WROUGHT


"Come see what God hath wrought."  

But this?  Don't blaspheme--or God will send you someplace to burn forever.  God didn't create these United States:  united in greed and hatred of the poor and xenophobic arrogance.   Not these United States, violent and murderous, where everybody has a gun and the nation itself owns more weapons of destruction than all the rest of the world in all of human history.  

God isn't responsible for these United States.  And you can't blame his son--the un-American known as Jesus--for what we have wrought.   Jesus told us--told even the Americans--to love one another:  to take care of the poor, not to steal, not to kill.  

"What God hath wrought."   God didn't  make this.  What we have wrought is not God's work:  not what any god made or created or designed.  We have wrought iron--and destruction, and war.  God wrought love--and life, and peace.

And while I'm at it:  God didn't make the North America than Americans inhabit today.  God didn't make those refuse-concealing mountains in New Jersey--or the Love Canal in New York.  God didn't make those topless mountains in eastern Kentucky, either, or the valleys full of poisoned landfill between them.  God didn't make America's polluted and poisonous rivers  or the air we can't safely breathe.  God didn't make the poisonous pesticides we use to put on the food we eat, or the poor deformed beasts that we eat pretending it is the meat of cattle and chickens.

"What God hath wrought."  False accusation is the sin called calumny, or slander.  We
are the guilty ones.  This world is our doing:  what we have wrought.  And yes, it includes our perverse and unpolitic politicians and their supporters.


                                                                       Bert Hornback

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