March 31: You Are God, Free Will, Donald Trump

You are God.  You want to make a forest, something to hold the soil, lock up solar energy, and give off oxygen.  Wouldn't it be simpler just to rough in a slab of chemicals, a green acre of goo?

Dillard imagines herself as God.  Creating a forest, in all its green complexity.  Dillard wrote this passage before global warming became the inspiration of Republican denial.  (Despite what Sarah Palin says, global warming is not a big, warm hug for God.)  She wrote it in 1974, when Richard Nixon was knee-deep in another kind of denial and Jimmy Carter was still a peanut farmer from Georgia.

It is the last day of March.  Now, thanks to El Nino and global warming, I saw snowflakes the size of golf balls falling from the heavens this afternoon.  I'm not kidding.  It lasted around five or ten minutes.  Looking out the window this afternoon and seeing those snowflakes reminded me of some scene from a bad science fiction movie.  The Day of the Triffids or Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, with weird nuclear fallout raining from the clouds.

I know that global warming is a little controversial.  Some people don't want to believe that we are killing our planet burning coal and oil and gasoline and what-not.  Some people don't want to believe that the polar icecap is receding, that the human race is headed toward an episode of The Twilight Zone where the sun is turning everything into ash and baked clay.  Some people prefer to raise their right hands in a Donald Trump pledge of loyalty (or neo-Nazi salute, whichever you prefer).

If I were God, I'm not sure how different the world would be.  There's this little thing called free will that gets in the way.  The human race is allowed to make choices, good or bad.  Shall we eat the apple or not?  Shall we cut down trees in the Amazonian rain forest or not?  Shall we drill for oil or not?  Shall we end world hunger or not?  God permits us to make these kinds of decisions. 

Unfortunately, the human race often fucks it up.  We cut down rain forests.  We drill for oil.  We allow people to starve.  We eat the apple.  That's the way it has been since almost the beginning of time.  We want to control our destinies, be gods.  Time and again, we learn that we aren't divine.  We are made in God's image.  We aren't God.

The best we can do, when faced with a difficult choice, is to reflect on it, pray about it, and then do the exact opposite of what Donald Trump would do.

Saint Marty is not being political.  He's just pointing out that Donald Trump is a serpent with bad hair.

Are you going to vote for this guy?