"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."