A Broken Record....

Shoes left behind at Auschwitz.

Humans want so badly to believe that we are basically good and perfectible if we just have the right laws, the right leaders and the right government. The fallacy of this was clearly demonstrated in the Old Testament. God meant it as a history lesson. The Children of Israel were given a promised land flowing with milk and honey, located right on all the best trade routes to insure prosperity. They were given perfect laws to govern their behavior. Had everyone obeyed those laws Israel would have been as close to Utopia as could be had. They asked God for stronger and stronger, more perfect leaders and a stronger centralized government like their neighbors had. God finally relented and gave them what they asked for. And the people waited for their nation to become strong and peaceful and perfect as it surely must under such a perfect system.

But God had warned them about kings and governments. He warned them that the king would take their sons for soldiers, their daughters for his wives and their earnings for his great palaces and his wars. Eventually, the Children of Israel sank so low that they killed the very Son of God.

But we want so badly to seize the power for ourselves as Satan promised Eve when he told her she would be like a god. So we ignore any evidence that we aren't going to be able to do the same thing we've tried over and over through thousands of years of human history. We avert our eyes from injustice or blame it on someone else. We forget the lessons of Auschwitz, the Soviet Gulags, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the millions of peasants starved to death in the Ukraine and China, the slaughter in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Chad, the Sudan, Somalia, Cuba and the Japanese Army's Unit 731. We keep repeating to ourselves, "We can be like gods." and we keep becoming devils instead. Instead of leading us to a Paradise on Earth, those who promise us human perfection through law, government and dear leaders keep giving us gulags, death camps and wholesale slaughter.

More horrors are coming again. I can smell the copper scent of blood as black-masked thugs beat up people to silence their opinions and to prevent them from hearing other voices than their own. I can hear it echoing through riot-torn streets. I can taste the bitter gun smoke in the aftermath of another mass shooting. Fresh horrors are coming but I am not afraid, for even if the liars and the thugs and the great men (ah, but I repeat myself); if the premiers, potentates and dear leaders do score a victory, it will be a hollow one, for they will soon receive oblivion as their reward. The Children of the Living God cannot lose no matter what the outcome of the war might be. That makes us mighty.

This makes it possible for me to smile, even as the clouds roll over our heads and the lightning barks its angry warning.

© 2017 by Tom King