Doing What We Can

WE ARE PROPHETS OF DOOM. My problem is that I think I'm going to die at any time, stroke, or heart attack. The longer I think this, the more likely it is that I am correct. The truth is, things aren't all that bad for me. I retired at sixty, work out every day, am in good shape, and don't appear, at least on paper, headed for a collapse. And, yet, I just know its coming...I feel a similar sense of impending doom for us all. That damned climate change thing haunts me, hangs over my balding head. Terrorism, I'll take my chances. Maybe I will have left the room when the bomb explodes...The truth is, far fewer bombs explode in America than forty or fifty years ago, and far fewer cops get shot. The other animals are gifted with the inability to ponder their own mortality, so we are told. Yet, cats and dogs seem to know when they are going to die. Everything is bad for us, we eat, breathe, and drink death, and we live beneath the pervasive threat of environmental catastrophe. I am angry and paranoid. I got off to a bad stat in the early nineteen sixties, hiding beneath my desk at school, while soviet bombers delivered atomic bombs above. I take comfort in the thought that the wooden desk protected me; none of the bombs reached me.I learned early that no matter how powerful, popular, or handsome a man, he can be shot at a distance by a nobody. Death is always at a distance, we know that the distance decreases, but slowly, and we delay it for another day. The Bible is no comfort, unless we cherry pick passages designed to inspire us. Every prophet in the old Testament discussed the problem of our suffering, and they all said the same thing: we have chosen to sin, we have chosen to disobey God's simple, but vital laws, so we must suffer. If God is God, God is not good. If God is good, god is not God, said some poet like e e cummings. Anyone who believes that the God of the new Testament is any less harsh than the one of the Old Testament, invite yourself to study the more recent document at greater length. Whatever comforts our religions offer us are fleeting and ephemeral. There are three things that are real, said the handsome man who was too mortal: God, human folly, and laughter. The first two are beyond our comprehension; let us do what we can with the third. Too bad the young man didn't live longer, although, had he not been shot young, he probably would have succumbed to his own poor health soon, in any event. This moment is all we have, and whatever memory we carry with us. Let us appreciate it as much as we can.