I really can't stop thinking about that asshole Tom DeLay and his callous condemnation (in effect) of hundreds of thousands of people he's never met who have suffered terribly. He's a sick, sick man if he can believe that not only could God allow the tsunami to happen, resulting in the deaths of countless people, but that he would make that happen. There is a difference here. The first is, I believe, the more common response to tragedy, a despairing wail, i.e. How could a just God allow this suffering? We've all been there. The second is the most pinched, uncharitable, hateful thing someone could assert. That God tsunami'd your ass, you heathen, precisely because you're not a member of the correct congregation/denomination/expatriation, or your skin is darker, or you forgot to pay your dollar in the Book of the Month Club. It's that absurd and hateful. 150,000 dead (so far) and half a million displaced, and this self-righteous bloviator reproaches us. What a pig.*
And it makes me worry, because I've seen articles arguing that this disaster is or is not the work of God. God is absent, God is present, God is in the wings, God micromanages...and it all makes me think, We don't really believe this hocus-pocus, do we? We're not really thinking there's a kind/punitive, fatherly-type (Santa Claus/Sauron) up in the sky directing tsunami traffic, right? I mean, I think I believe in God, but if "God" is what these psychotically punitive wackos are saying God is, I do not want any part of it. I certainly believe in a transcendent force, in hope, in imagination, in intellect, in things I don't understand, in mystery, the unknown and unknowable, in the endless quest, all of which makes being human being human. It even makes being human divine on occasion. I've seen a dead person, and it's obvious that there's definitely something missing there; that the person lying in the coffin is not your Uncle Julio or Grandma Bette, and we can call it a soul or life force or whatever, but it's plain as the nose on his or her face that it's missing. So, yes, force of some kind.
Tom DeLay sees those people lying dead, torn asunder, and thinks, That's what you get, heathen. He is a depraved person -- what else can he be? And he's terribly uninformed and doesn't understand parable to boot. I mean, to hold a view in Jesus' name that Jesus himself would revile? You've got the wrong end of the stick, old boy. Tom DeLay clearly does not understand love. Or Jesus, for that matter. Damn him. Damn him with haiku.
DeLay speaks for God:
His Jesus raging lion
Your country the lamb.
DeLay loves God's work
His earthly convictions firm:
Your world sits on sand.
*I need another word here. Pigs are, actually, quite smart -- smarter than Tom DeLay, for sure -- and they have the capacity to grieve loss -- unlike Tom DeLay -- and I hate to keep disparaging them. My apologies, pigs. It won't happen again. Maybe I can say, "What a Tom DeLay!", from now on to register my utter disgust? Hmm.
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