Never Happen
In Adult Sunday School class last week, my intent had been to present for discussion General Convention 2012 resolution A049 Authorize Liturgical Resources for Blessing Same-Gender Relationships, and look at the approved liturgy. Instead came what was done in Connecticut, and as my own need to find God somehow in the nightmare, we read in The Book of Common Prayer, our liturgy for the burial of children. In doing, we compared Psalm 116 in a couple of translations, including Today’s English Translation where verse 15 gives the soothing assurance, “How painful it is to the Lord when one of his people dies.”
Inevitably, discussion turned to the horror, and I wondered if I sensed a hopelessness about what could be done to prevent.
We are a nation obsessed with rights, our rights, our individual rights. That rights have responsibilities never occurs. Yahoo News this week had an article about a home gardener who turned his front yard into a vegetable garden. Neighbors were not happy: in a lawned neighborhood it was unsightly, threatening property values, possibly attracting pest, rats. Municipal code enforcement cited the owner for not maintaining the required ground cover. The homeowner gardener was sure of his right to use his property in this productive way, and determined. Reading comments, one visualized a mob of peaceful gardeners with torches, pitchforks and a rope headed for city hall.
How peaceful it might be to live in a world where the headline is “Ashton Files for Divorce from Demi.” Or “Who Will Win the $10,000 Cupcake War on TV?” Or even “Man Grows Vegetables in Front Yard.” Never happen. As long as humans have dominion the news will be ugly, because the raw truth is that we evolved to fight. Even our hands, a science piece reports, have taken their shape to give us optimum power to punch crushingly, once we stopped swinging from limb to limb, came down from trees and went bipedal. We love a fight (how to put ice hockey out of business: ban fighting), we love to hunt, we love to shoot. Bullets, pellets, BBs, arrows, slingshots, slings, spears, smooth stones.
We are hunters and we are fighters and Blonds Prefer Alphas, which when everything is said and done is what it’s all about anyway and thank you very much David and Paula oops make that David and Bathsheba.
Fighting is manly and victors are heroes and anyone who shrinks from a fight is contemned. 1 Samuel 17, the Sunday School story of the ages:
At least three things must happen to curb the insanity in which all are complicit.
Gun control including confiscation, going against the popular and accepted view of the Second Amendment right to bear arms. The People v. NRA. Never happen.
Insanity control including Identification, involuntary commitment and concentration of mentally ill whom psychiatrists certify pose a danger to society, going against the Fifth Amendment right to due process. The People v. ACLU. Never happen.
Culture control including radical cultural reform that obliterates such as electronic games of violence that have yielded a violence prone society, going against the First Amendment right to -- free speech, free expression? The People v. the People. Never happen.
Meantime, the suggestion to make every school an armed fortress seems real, though there were armed security guards at Columbine. And though the idea of a national volunteer force for armed school security is as immature, childish, amateur and ridiculous as something reported out of a small group during a paid church consultant’s weekend on church growth. Nevertheless. It isn’t that something must be done. Everything must be done.
Never happen. Everyone will make smoke about their rights until everyone throws up their hands and their lunch and gives up.
T