Dear God:
I realize we haven’t spoken in a while, but please don’t let that stop you from hearing me out.
Lincoln, famously, during the Civil War developed the idea that you (or some anonymous entity or force by another name that might as well be called God) had chosen that terrible war as a punishment for failing to eradicate the sin of slavery. Perhaps he was right. Or perhaps, in the depths of his great depressive illness, haunted as he was by the images of death and destruction for which he was in no small part responsible, he came to see greater forces at work than mere human hands because otherwise the guilt he endured would have been too great to bear.
I recall that bit of history for you today, because in many ways it would be easy to see the failures of our nation and the countless abuses of our leaders as a sign that you have chosen once again to put this nation through the crucible of war and political turmoil as a punishment of sorts for the sins of our times. Not the sins that the fundamentalists among us would highlight as causes for your disfavor, but sins of far greater reach and proportion.
(Cont.)
The sins of greed and avarice, hubris and pride, ignorance and indifference. For it is from these sins that all of the worst crimes for which our nation is responsible have arisen. War, torture, theft, corruption and the myriad of lies that have been told and that too many of us have chosen to believe despite all evidence to the contrary.
Yet that places too much responsibility in your hands, in my humble opinion. For if you exist, I do not envision you as a small three year old throwing tantrums and lashing out at all those who refuse to do what you have demanded. I choose to believe you have given us the gift of this life, not to be your slaves and toys, to be discarded when they no longer please you, but to find our own way to goodness, to happiness, to the moral life.
In short, I do not blame any God for our faults and flaws, for our mistakes and errors. We the people have chosen this path. Too many of us, in the wake of the unprecedented power and wealth that fell our way after World War II chose to believe that this tremendous good fortune was only our due, and that it would remain a permanent feature in our lives. Collectively we were seduced by the lie that we were entitled to do as we please when we please because we were a superior people, blessed above all other nations on the earth. Better, stronger, more faithful and true.
We were seduced into believing that we and we alone were the masters of our fate, and that cooperation with other nations, and even among ourselves was an unnecessary encumbrance to our freedom and a limitation on our right to dominate. The end of the Cold War only reinvigorated this triumphalist myth that so many of us told each other.
And at the height of our supremacy many of us forgot the depths from which we had climbed. The Great Depression was a collective failure of the very same illusions that we have chosen to follow today, and it was only a collective, cooperative effort led by the government of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that brought us to the position we enjoyed in 1945 and beyond.
Yet, rather than continue to accept that the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts, we grew lazy and selfish as a nation. We would rather believe the myth that we are a country of self made men and women, rather than a country who prospers best when our government acts to ensure the collective welfare of us all. We came to believe that equality was a fact rather than a goal to be continually sought after by each new generation. We came to believe that our individual successes were the sole result of our own efforts, rather than the beneficiaries of a system of laws and government that provided the benefits that made those individual successes possible.
The result? We are led by ideologues and fools, arrogant and blind to their faults, and willing to lie, cheat, steal and kill to retain their hold on power. Where once we had a government that worked (however inefficiently and inadequately) to provide for the common good, we now have a government dedicated to the proposition that what is good for the wealthiest among us, and for the corporations they control, is good for the rest of us, too. A nation where the news is censored and criticism of the government is muted and ignored. A nation where the leaders serve themselves and their friends at the expense of the rest of us. A nation awash in lies. A nation that is slowly bleeding to death.
I do not blame you for this, God. This was all our own doing. It fits a pattern in history that is as repetitive as it is despairing. We, the American people, have brought this disaster on ourselves. We are the ones responsible for allowing this minority of opportunists and ideologues to seize power using nothing more than our own greed and fear as the means to control us and bring our democracy to its knees.
So I do not expect you to help us change this course. It is our responsibility and our great task to right the wrongs and reclaim our country from the criminals who lead us, who act as our overlords and treat us as no better than serfs. But, if you can help us, by encouraging those who fight in the political trenches to change the direction of this country, or by opening the hearts of the ignorant to the truth about our leaders crimes, we wouldn’t turn you down.
Amen.
