A chill wind

Thursday, April 07, 2016

The chill gets into my bones in particular this time of year.

I expect this in winter, but the calendar claims this as spring and I’ve already sprung ahead to believe it should be – so my bones hurt as if betrayed.

I strolled along the Kill Van Kull late last week feeling the cold air sweep off the water like an invading army.

It takes over the landscape and holds its ground.

And I am helpless to recapture the good feeling the promise of spring usually brings me.

I live my life marked by changing seasons the way my grandparents have, and their grandparents before them.

But we are living in a new era where these things matter less or are less predictable.

Call it climate change or global warming, it has changed the fundamental make up of what it means to be human, and put us out of touch with the natural order.

Bible-thumpers tell us there is no such thing, hiding their fear behind capitalistic greed.

We dare not admit that after God gave us dominion over the earth, we screwed everything up, turning the world into a place that no longer has a time for growing and a time for letting go, a time for being born and a time for mourning.

We the unwise caretakers of the earth have turned the world into a maze of unpredictably we cannot pray back into submission. So we get 70 degrees on Christmas and 30 degrees two weeks after Easter has expired.

This is not to say that a chill this time of year is unnatural. There have been cold spells before.

But it is clear that those who put faith in god have very little faith in the cycles god set up, and could care less about undermining his creation for their own gain.

Behind each page of the Bible is a greedy capitalist, finding holy words with which to justify his or her greed. And there is a host of true believers who get lured into believing anything that comes wrapped up in scripture, too naïve or ignorant to realize that The Bible is a metaphor, one vast poem saying this is like that, and never meant to be taken literally.

I guess we are so lost in this maze of choices that we will grasp at anything that seems to know which way to go, even if it is in the wrong direction, even if it is a map drawn by a master manipulator steering us to ends that do not profit us in the end or liberate our souls.

We are so desperate for miracles to solve problems we can’t or won’t solve for ourselves that we will follow any huckster showing us cheap tricks and misquoting scripture. We are lambs being led to slaughter.

And the chill I feel isn’t merely from the weather, but from seeing massive rallies like the one that took place in Long Island last night, a flock of misguided, misled fools headed off a cliff, willing to drag the rest of us with them.