Crossing the line: some random thoughts, post-election

"And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it." Matthew 7:26-27

After 911, I remember that distinct, visceral sense that a line had been crossed: the secure wall of our national innocence had been breached. The unthinkable had happened -- to US! -- to these great United States! We were invincible, or so I had grown up believing; even in the "Communist era" of my post-50's childhood, I always believed that, as a country, we were just too mighty and too powerful to mess with. Whatever dangers we faced, our good would always outweigh their evil -- no matter who "they" were. But the moment that second jetliner came into view and its intent was clear, everything changed irreversibly: within that image, crashing and burning itself into the nation's psyche, was the terrible revelation that savage outsiders no longer feared us.

I could go on about what happened to weaken us, how the foundations laid by our forefathers had been undermined, but I would just be repeating what has already been said well by many others. Suffice to say, whatever set us up for the breach, we all knew after 911 that America could never be the same again.

I mention all this because the results of Tuesday's election had a similar effect on me. Somehow, this was more than the re-election of a bad President; it was a line crossed, like the line on 911, an event from which there was no turning back: a black cloud gathering on the horizon, a portent of things to come.

Over the past four years, we have witnessed deception, corruption, criminal neglect, homicidal culpability, racism, and Constitution-shredding (to name a few) on a scale unprecedented in the federal government and the Presidency. We have watched our culture degenerate into filthy masses of self-absorbed "occupiers" and black-racist flash mobs preying, with impunity, like wild animals on innocent civilians. We have listened with disbelief to our President and news media fawning to a satanic religion of destruction and blood-lust while, in the same breath, ridiculing every call to moral continence, and deriding as evil the Biblical principles our laws, our government, and our great American culture were founded on.

So when I stopped at my polling place (i.e., the local volunteer firehouse) on my way to work Tuesday, I was heartened by the long line I had to wait on. All these people, I imagined, were as anxious as I was to "throw the bastards out."

Almost symbolically, this election day was taking place a week after Superstorm Sandy. Most of us had been without power for those seven days, unable to traverse the roads (which around here are all back roads), and had just begun to see the grim photos of the decimated coastline we had, till then, only been hearing about -- Staten Island, where I had grown up, and the Jersey shore, which had been summer vacation to most of us since memory began. 

By voting day, power was beginning to come back, trees and power lines were being moved from the roadways, and we were experiencing a gradual resurrection back to normal life. As we stood in line, looking vaguely surprised by the presence of electric lighting, there was an unspoken, communal sense of regrouping, of picking ourselves up and going on, of getting strong again after the knock-down. Beauty for ashes, sort of.

But I had felt, as have others, that there had been something prophetic in the timing of Sandy, in it’s seemingly conscious intent to steer itself into the northeast coast. I don't want to go off the deep end with it, but that sharp left-hook did give a lot of people pause; after all, one cannot believe in God and coincidence. And then, in one night, there went life at the shore as so many had known and remembered it -- a whole swath of personal history suddenly in ruins, swamped, ripped up, swept into the vast, mindless ocean. A divine metaphor, perhaps, for what we could only expect for our country, having succeeded in grinding the foundation of our national house into sand. And there was plenty of sand in the pictures -- window-height to those houses spared total demolition -- seeming to only further drive home the point.

But I digress.

So here we were at the polls, with our last chance to repent of the insane spending, the crushing debt, the legal corruption and moral degradation -- all in eerie tandem with these fresh visions of devastation, sorrow, and loss; and the dark, chill nights when we had felt so cut off. This was the moment we had been waiting for: Light restored. Obama out.

Well, it was not to be, as we now know. I'll refrain from questioning the numbers, though it's tempting. Whether that many people in America are that blind and/or stupid, or whether the whole thing was rigged, is a moot issue. We're stuck, and so we must batten down and be prepared for what's headed our way.

But back to Sandy: God has always ordained the storms and the places they invade. They are purposeful forces, designed to prune and cleanse the earth, making way for renewed life. Man, knowing this full well, but willing to put aside wisdom to pursue pleasure, chooses to believe he can weather the inherent dangers and builds where the wise would not. Again, this is metaphoric. I believe we have, in this election, forsaken the better part of wisdom, choosing to ignore the myriad affronts to God in an endeavor to attain an elusive ideal built on many fictions, where evil is good and good is evil, and the illusion of invincibility is as strong as ever. It is only a matter of time until our house falls.

Thomas Jefferson, recently much-maligned 3rd American President, said it well:

"God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the Gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever."