Had, as Osama binLaden lamented in late November, 2008, God grown tired of us?
Could the human species have become so self-absorbed with pettiness that more intrinsic matters mattered least?
Did we not puzzle over the weird wretchedness of the world today?
Like a father weary of his young son's arrant behavior, had God given up on us again as He did just before he instructed Noah to build an ark? Was God fed up with our shameless materialism, consumerism, avarice and unabashed hubris?
Even after He created the universe, God put aside Sunday as a day of rest.
We mere mortals, on the other hand, chose to see Sunday as just another day of the week. A day which was not devoted to our faith and family, but to our businesses, our golf games, our cook-outs, our mistresses, our money, our drugs, and our pursuit of personal happiness. Could all the odd things going on in the world be signs from God - or from an intelligent designer, or an evolutionary 'big bang' theory, or 'nature'?
For all the time mankind has inhabitated this insignificant third rock from the sun, we have progressively removed ourselves further and further from the holiness of the Earth. We have traded sacredness for sanctimonious self-indulgence. And we fail to notice the subtle changes - perhaps warnings - that may very well be predicting our own doom.
Even today, in 2009, most of Earth's inhabitants pooh-pooh the theory that something called 'global warming' is about to destroy the planet as we know it. So we keep on building smoke-belching factories, driving gas-guzzling cars that spit out toxic vehicle emissions, and refusing to reduce, reuse, or recycle or refuse.
To most people, such attention to environmental issues is inconsequential; we're too busy admiring ourself in the new Bill Blass strapless gown we bought at $400 less than its usual price. We're showing off our newest $3 shirt that sports a $24 alligator on its breast pocket.
Unless we're a marine biologist, we don't seem to take notice when another giant squid crash lands on a remote beach. Isn't it odd that such an occurence - which apparently hasn't happened in centuries - now happens almost on a semi-annual basis? What causes the squid - who lurks in the deepest, most remote parts of the ocean - to suddenly wash up on the shores of our beaches? Is something going on underwater that we don't know about? Shouldn't we take more interest in such activity?
For the past forty years, the United States government has poured untold billions down countless rat holes, and American citizens are too busy worrying about Britney Spears' love life to pay any attention. The federal government has squandered taxpayer dollars an the ill-fated Vietnam War; the Watergate investigation; the "Star Wars" initiative; the failed "war on drugs"; the Iran-Contra affair; the short-lived Gulf War in 1991; the titilating Bill Clinton witch hunt; a paranoid "war on terror"; an unconstitutional and immoral war in Iraq; a Hitleresque Department of Homeland Security; a reckless immigration policy and numerous 'pork' projects and 'earmarks' so near and dear to unscrupulous politicians. Yet no one seemed to notice - or care - when the federal government would allocate $4 million for a teapot museum in North Carolina. Afer a brief uproar, an Alaskan "bridge to nowhere" still was built with taxpayers' money.
Years after Hurricane Katrina an impotent federal government had still not established housing for most victims of that tragedy. And most Americans only watched in awe as the "in-depth" television newscasts fed us a two-minute Pubulum of some poor slob still living on his roof. But when it came to New Orleans, most Americans had a bigger concern: when would Bourbon Street be back to normal, and what kind of a package deal can I get to go watch all the transvestities, street musicians and gay blades strut their stuff??
Americans uncomfortably avoided its poor, sick, disabled, underprivileged, disadvantaged, hungry, undereducated, mentally challenged, and homeless because it caused an inconvenient pang - a prick - in our collective consciousness. It was not our fault, after all, that these people don't live in $675,000 homes, drive new Mercedes roadsters, or own $2,000,000 stock portfolios. What about those kids who have never seen a tree, never thrown a football, never slept without rats crawling around their toes, never consumed a meal that didn't come wrapped in grease-splattered paper? Well, yeah....that was too bad, but what could we do about it?
God had given us the ability to be generous, to share with others and care for every species on the planet. But few of us ever took into account how important a rare Amazon frog might be to our own existence. Few of us bothered to protest the decimation of our rain forests, complain about luxury vacation resorts wiping out ecologically-valuable (and necessary) mangrove forests. Oil spills in pristine Alaskan waters didn't affect our lives in the middle of Manhattan.
It was national news in 2007 when a missing pregnant woman in Ohio generated an outpour to more than 1,000 volunteers to search for her body. Yet, a hundred times that many people squeeze themselves into football stadiums every Sunday to 'watch' a game and criticize a player's disastrous fumble (and what makes the sports voyeur think he could have played that game any better?). It's amazing how we won't get off our dead ass to help someone else, but we'll put ourselves through the trials of Hell to make our way to the 'big game' or show up at the Inaugural Ball.
We paid scant attention when a tsunami ripped away Asian communities because they were thousands of mile away from us. But we're obsessively enraged when someone scratches our car or throws a stone through our window.
The question was worth posing: has God grown tired of us? Has He finally thrown up his hands in disgust and said, "The hell with 'em! Let' em all drown in their own cesspools of self-gratification!" Were the hurricanes and earthquake that