May You Live In Interesting Times!

These are interesting times.  I really don’t think too many people would disagree with that.  Although there is an old curse which I have heard attributed either to the Chinese or to Yiddish that states, “May you live in interesting times”.  At first hearing I couldn’t figure out what it meant but finally it dawned on me that to live in boring times meant that all is well in the best of all possible worlds.  That certainly cannot fit the definition of what we are living in now.

 

Although every country, it seems, across and around the globe has problems, in this short blog it is not possible to enumerate them all, so I will simply name two that are happening here in the United States. 

At this particular time the most glaring is the rampant racism that we all thought had gone away with the election of President Obama.  I think that perhaps his election and re-election indicates that the majority of people in this country are on board with people of color or LGBT people having the same equal rights as everyone else.  The problem is that there is a sub-culture that ebbs and flows in numbers and intensity that has a tendency to shock the more rational rungs of our society in manners that are violent and horrifying.  Although the majority of law enforcement officers are good and decent people who view everyone equally, there is a subculture among them that is imbued with the idea that anyone of color is automatically a criminal suspect on the grounds that if that person is not doing something wrong right now, they probably were yesterday and will tomorrow, so we might as well shoot them now.  All one needs do is go to the website for League of the South and read to the very end.  It is scary!  So African-American citizens now have to deal with another domestic terrorist attack on people, at prayer, and in a church.  This alone is such an obscenity, but to be perpetrated by a young man who is hardly out of short pants is an obscenity in itself.   

As if racism isn’t enough we have the overwhelming looming disaster of climate change.  If one looks at a drought monitor map on television, the part of California where the red is the darkest indicating the severity of the drought, above where the shore line takes a curve inland at Santa Barbara, is where I live.  Our little community has cut its water use by 40%, but the trees in this area are under severe stress.  In our canyon we have some mighty native Sycamore trees that should be in full and glorious leaf.  Instead they have a few straggly greenish brown leaves that look very thirsty.  Of course the community is worried about fire, and is taking steps to educate itself on how to make a house more fire safe, and if evacuation is required, what to take and how to take it.   

Most of us, Catholic or not, are thrilled with the Pope’s Encyclical on Climate Change.  One need not share his religion, but can certainly be excited that he calls out climate deniers for what many of them are:  greedy.  To curtail our destruction of the earth, many of them will not be able to make such massive profits at the expense of both the environment herself (Mother Nature), but our children and their children.  Some climate deniers have the quaint belief that we should just let God take care of it.  Fortunately I have low blood pressure to start out with because that statement usually raises  it for me. 

For the sake of this argument, we are going to assume that God created the earth and people.  If that is the case, then God also created the emotions that people have.  If that is the case, then God created the emotion called in our culture, “worry”.  If no one worried about anything, nothing good and positive would ever get done!   It is only by worrying about something that gets people up off their respective derrière’s to do something about what they are worrying about.  Of course there will be some things people can do nothing about, and then worrying about those things won’t help at all, becomes anxiety, and could become debilitating, so some discretion is required to avoid that.  But by and large, worrying is a good thing, and always sitting back and “letting God take care of it” is a cop-out. 

We worry about climate change so we consolidate our trips as much as possible.  We always run multiple errands when we leave home because it takes us 10 miles to the nearest small community.  We recycle; we have solar panels on our home; we do what we can where we are.  The Pope worries about climate change and writes an Encyclical to alert the world to what it can do.  We all need to worry, and do what we can, where we are, with what we have. 

As for racism, this is going to take a concerted effort on the part of Caucasians to change the hearts and minds of their fellow white humans to understand that rather than say there is the black race, white race, brown race, yellow race, pink with purple stripes race, we are all members of the human race.  And this human race had better start working on climate change, or it won’t matter what we are, we will all be living in deep yogurt. 

I would rather live in more boring times!!