July 31st Fireworks

01/August/2011 08:15 Filed in: Web News | Oikos Thoughts
I was reminded in church yesterday how we consider “Acts of God” to be disasters, hurricanes, tsunamis, heat waves and the like. Yet we never consider the sun rise this morning, and other environmental conditions are such that the vast majority of humans on this earth are not only more numerous, but also more materially wealthy than anytime in history. These too are Acts of God, as well as gifts of God’s grace, which flows out of His natural law that keeps everything in amazing order.

Last night in Spokane I had the pleasure of witnessing the 33rd Anniversary Royal Fireworks Concert in Riverfront Park. The centerpiece of this display of human achievement features the music of George Frederick Handel, of Hallelujah Chorus fame, fulfilling the sovereign wishes of “George II of England in 1749, to commemorate the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle which ended the War of Austrian Succession.”

In the grand scheme of human endeavors, this war, that encompassed most of Europe, was over a petty thing, like who should be the ruler of Austria, surely not a woman; not all that much different from the debt ceiling piece of artistic work hammered out in the halls of the American Congress, about the same clock time as the fireworks in Spokane.

Just as in the Austrian war, the debt-crisis-ceiling war in Congress, seemingly beneath the calling of the current American sovereign, definitely was not an Act of God, or a gift of His grace, but rather a reprehensible, repugnant and ridiculous display of an act of mankind.

So why is it we are so disposed to label the bad things of nature as resulting from a wrathful God, yet give the unfolding reality of the end of the Industrial Age, as just a politically difficult evolutionary necessity, as we become gods of our own demise?

There were human fireworks in Washington DC last night. To celebrate this event I wanted to drive to the Indian Reservation fireworks stand, buy a box of sparklers, a few Roman Candles, for that Roman connection may be the act of man that becomes “too big to save”; and look for that 10 year old jar of instant coffee, to make a representative fine beverage.

So on Wednesday our next weekly column will feature three RE-words: Reprehensible, Repugnant and Reactionary; by then the bill may have passed, or not, but truthfully nothing of significance will have changed regarding the debt and the symphony of other dastardly recent economic and political acts of man.

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