Larry Hart
Between Morning Cereal and Prayer
Each morning after Jack has been walked, morning meds dispensed, breakfast eaten, and the dishes done there is just enough time to sip a little more coffee and very quickly skim the news headlines on the internet before Brenda sits down with me for morning prayer. I probably shouldn’t read or listen to any news since it tends to make me nuts, or nuttier than I am; nevertheless, I consistently skim the headlines. With the risk of embarrassing Brenda by exposing just how much of a “kook” I am, here are some things that have set me off recently and what I thought about them before the quiet sanity of prayer set in. So, I guess you could call this an opinion piece. Not a well-informed opinion representing my nicer self, but something more akin to a primitive reaction Brenda has not yet quieted down.
The High Cost of Space Vacations
After reading about the rich and famous taking off planet holidays, I have come to the conclusion that space vacations are entirely too expensive. I mean they are totally out of reach for the average family of 3.23 persons. And if you count the cost of constructing the launch site as well as the spaceship, or whatever it’s called, well it is just not affordable. What I mean is it is not affordable when the actual good it could have done in a world where we are drowning in a sea of human need is considered. So, I think whatever it costs to develop and launch a rocket for space vacations –– four times that amount should go to buy something like COVID 19 vaccine for 3rd world countries. The thing is, we obviously can’t really afford to continue to support the rich. Not only that, but they defecate everywhere (rivers, oceans, cities, Mount Everest) and now in space and expect everyone else to clean up their mess. Unlike Robert Fulghum they obviously did not learn everything they need to know in kinderdarten––”When you make a mess clean it up.”
Fantasy Football Money
It is apparently that time of year when football coaches are on the move. Those with losing records are being fired, and the successful being offered contracts that make the greedy salivate. Even I could probably be persuaded to teach two desperate kids to collide head on at 960 kg-m/s on an open field for say $1,000,000 a year. But wow! for ten times that (Brian Kelly’s LSU contract) I would maybe be willing to do it myself, provided I could use a hover board to get up to speed and the money was payable to my designated beneficiaries in the event of my expiration. Seriously, if I were declared the mad king for a day, I would degree that any college paying a head football coach $100,000,000 must offer an equal amount in free tuition; and no longer receive federal assistance. I don’t understand why we can’t create colleges that make their football teams proud. It all makes me think of a cartoon I once saw: Strange looking creatures from some distant planet are conducting an archeological dig on Earth a thousand years from now. One of them is saying, “If they paid their sports and entertainment celebrities this much think what they must have paid the really important people like schoolteachers. There is not anything money touches that it does not spoil.
The Curse of Self-Grandiosity
I see where Melinda Gates in explaining why she acquiesced to her husband Bill’s infidelity said: “The rich live by different rules from everyone else.” That’s precisely the problem, isn’t it? We all want to think that we enjoy a personal exceptionalism to the spiritual and moral principles inherent in reality itself. Self-grandiosity is the curse of humanity.
A Violent Christmas to Y’all
Congressional Representative Thomas Massie (KY 4th District) within just a few days after the Michigan School shooting that left four high school students dead and seven wounded, posted a Christmas photo of his family of seven with big cheese smiles, holding highly lethal military style weapons––including his young pre or early adolescent daughter. In the background is a tall, full, beautifully decorated Christmas tree. Massie’s tweet reads: “Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo.” When I consider the juxtaposition of those symbols of violence, blood, and death with the sign of peace, joy, and life expressed in the Christmas (literally Christ Mass) tree, and when I consider the happy, healthy faces of the wealthy Massie family in contrast to the anguished countenances of all those whose children have been brutally shot to death, and when I think about the sheer callousness, the inhumanity, of Tom’s tweet it makes me feel sick all over. What kind of people elect someone like that to public office?
A Movie Obscene and Absurd
Reel Works Studios and Liberty University (Jerry Falwell Jr.) made a really bad film, The Trump Prophecy. I have known for some time its making was being discussed, but have just discovered while browsing the internet news that it was actually completed and shown in theaters in 2018. It portrays Donald Trump as God’s messiah to 21st century America––– a view shared by influential fundamentalist leaders like Franklin Graham, Richard Land, and the Southern Baptist preacher Robert Jeffers. I don’t understand at all why it was not given an OA rating––obscene and absurd. That such a crazy notion is accepted as orthodox by any Christian group is absolutely mindboggling and makes sense only if understood as the sort of insane delusion that is sometimes manifested in psychotic patients. I wonder if any of these people (rank and file fundamentalists and charismatics) have ever noticed that 666 Fifth Avenue in New York was owned by the Kuushners?
The Pseudo-god of Technology––Or I’ll be a Monkey’s Uncle
In an opinion piece Peter Rex, the venture capitalist, tells how at a luncheon for high tech executives in Silicon Valley he made the sign of the cross before beginning to eat–– moving his hand from his forehead to his chest and to both shoulders. “The questions,” he says, “came flying, What was that, what does it mean, why do you do it?” In this 11/20/21 U.S.A. feature he argues that the tech industry is hostile to religious conviction and practice of any sort, and thinks faith is for “rubes.” Silicon Valley, he argues, creates a hole in the human spirit and then fills it with the pseudo god of technology; indeed, fills it with the leaders of big tech who believe themselves to be god. Rex is worth quoting at length:
You see glimpses in Silicon Valley’s elitism a disdain for morality, such as LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman’s explicit desire to invest in companies built around the seven deadly sins, like lust, laziness, and anger.
You also see it in the industry’s embrace of “transhumanism” and pursuit of immortality through tech-enabled enhancements. I find it telling that in an industry where the afterlife is often an afterthought leaders like Amazon’s Jeff Bozos and Googles Sergey Brin and Larry Page are trying to end aging and death itself.
Equally dangerous and prevalent, is the view that technology itself is god. Look no further than the fascination with the “metaverse,” an all-encompassing reality. The hope is that this fake existence will save us from the mess we’ve made in real life. This misplaced faith has also led to a belief that tech can ignore the old constraints of right and wrong. Is it any wonder tech is increasingly used to censor and suppress? In the eyes of many. . . the means of tech’s use matters less than the end to which it can deliver us––namely paradise.
But technology and science, whether mathematical, physical, life, or social science, has been promising paradise now for nearly four hundred years; yet, here we are driving down the freeway to dystopia. Who knows, perhaps now that they are implanting human genes in monkeys we will eventually arrive on the Planet of the Apes, and maybe our monkey nephews and nieces will do a better job than we have. But I would recommend anyone wanting to give serious philosophical or theological thought to such mattes read C. S. Lewis’s science fiction / dystopian / fantasy novel, The Hideous Strength.
Police, Protests, and Satyagraha Power
I pretty much skip over articles on defunding the police, mainly because I think it’s one of the dumbest ideas to come along in quite some time; although, if were a criminal I am sure I would be an enthusiastic supporter. I do think well considered national criteria for police recruitment, training, and procedures ought to be established, and that there should be zero tolerance for excessive police force and acts of violence whether an officer is on or off duty. But if a woman living alone calls 911 because someone is breaking in I want a bunch of officers there fast, and if a motorcyclist passes me doing 95 on the freeway I want the police to have the personnel and equipment to get him safely off the road––maybe even be equipped to track and meet him as he arrives home with a mobile crusher that would reduce his motorcycle to the size of a band aid box on the spot. But I am beginning to fantasize. I tend to do that when thinking about things that annoy me. However, my imagination is not running away with me when I say I am opposed to violence in every form––verbal, physical, sexual, economic, political––perpetrated by any individual or any group even if I agree passionately with their end goal. I reject without equivocation the notion that the end justifies the means––even where it concerns speeding motorcyclists endangering themselves and everyone else on the road. I believe that the call to become a Christian is the call to become a satyagraha, one who holds firmly and passionately to the practice of love and truth as spiritual force––a divine power filling the devotee even in times of apparent failure.