OCTOBER 11 2015
Does violence against creation and the killing by humans have a common root?
There are 33,000 people in America who lose their lives to gun violence each year and more than twice as many are injured by bullets. There also were 994 mass shootings in 1,004 days. These mass shootings caused 1,260 deaths and 3606 injured, the latest just last week in Oregon.
Welcome to “The City of the Hill, the envy of all nations”. Or is it? The Oregon school shooting is evidence that the US response to gun violence “has become routine”, Barack Obama says: “The reporting is routine. My response here at this podium ends up being routine. The conversation in the aftermath of it is routine. We have become numb to this.”
Obama continued: “What’s also routine is that somebody, somewhere, will comment and say ‘Obama politicized this issue.’ Well this is something we should politicize. It is relevant to our common life together, to the body politic.”
Of course anything Obama says is contested by the slate of Republican contenders for the presidency who always object to more gun restrictions. One of them, Jeb Bush, said: “We’re in a difficult time in our country and I don’t think more government is necessarily the answer to this. I think we need to reconnect ourselves with everybody else. It’s just very sad to see.”
Bush continued: “But I resist the notion — and I had this challenge as governor — because we had — look, stuff happens, there’s always a crisis. And the impulse is always to do something and it’s not necessarily the right thing to do.”
“Stuff happens.” What is true of indifference to gun-killing by the Republican candidates for the presidency- and Canada’s Harper regime – also applies to our natural world. “Stuff happens.” That we’re sitting on planetary boundaries right now, and that these systems may flip from one stable state to another unstable point, is not mentioned. That the Amazon rainforests may tip into a savannah, that the Arctic loses its ice cover and instead of reflecting the sun’s rays starts to absorb them in water, and that the glaciers all melt and cannot feed the rivers — is not a campaign issue, because the majority of people don’t believe that.
Nevertheless there are more and more signs that we may have reached a saturation point. Forests show the first signs of absorbing less carbon. The oceans are rapidly acidifying as they absorb more CO2, harming fish and coral. Global average temperatures keep rising.
Both in Canada and in the USA the next governments there will face a world that suddenly may tip into a state where the planet no longer can absorb the daily doses of pollutants we pour into its air, its waters and its soils. When nature goes against you, watch out.
“Stuff happens.” 33,000 are killed each year in the USA by guns alone. That works out to almost 100 deadly shootings each day. “Stuff happens.” Have gun, will kill. The Harper party in Canada killed the gun control law. Let’s pray that he will be soundly defeated on October 19. No Christian in his or her right mind – those loving God and his entire creation – can in good conscience vote for this politician who had gutted environmental laws, has muzzled scientists who spoke out on environmental issues and fired a scientist who composed a song called “The Harperman” faintly ridiculing the Prime Minister.
“Thou shalt not kill” is one of the Ten Commandments. It also applies to nature. Killing nature means killing people who depend on it. That’s why degradation of the one leads to degradation of the other. That degradation also applies to disdain for other religions. During the current Canadian election, that same Harper man is using the niqab issue – the all-face covering by Muslim women – to black-ball all Islam followers, making fear for certain people an election issue. Beware of Christians – like Harper – who believe in heaven as their ultimate destination: they defile creation and they think they have a special line to God knowing who will be saved and who will burn in hell. Beware of Christians who hate sinners but condone sin.
Possession of guns kills. We have to start the process of curtailing our gun culture, and I don’t say that as an anti-gun absolutist, but as a person who while serving in the military from 1949-51 was trained to instruct young recruits how to use guns to kill others. In my instructor days, when bayonets were still fitted to rifles I even had to make these young conscripts simulate killing people with that sharp tool by sticking it into bales of straw and yelling their heads off.
I remember once going hunting for the first and last time in my life. When I had a rabbit in the scope, I simply could not pull the trigger. That’s how fainthearted a person I have become. I have a grandson who hunts deer with a bow and arrow somewhere in Wisconsin where there are too many deer. I can see the use there.
But to kill people?
Well, wait a minute. We kill creation every day. We already have killed half of the large wild animals in the world. We already have killed almost all the large fish in the seas. We already have appropriated half of the entire earth-mass for the exclusive use for us humans. We kill thousands of people in the Middle East by our inhuman policies. We kill a cruel million people every year in automobile accidents and maim or injure many millions more. In addition, untold billions are breathing in lethal gases from our auto tail pipes. Thanks to Climate Change we soon will kill millions in Africa and Asia by inducing either too much rain or not enough.
In a word: we all are a thoroughly murderous bunch.
No wonder there is a lot of fear out there. Fear kills. Mass shootings that take place in the USA almost every day come forth from fear. Instead of creating awareness that guns kill, and that only abstinence, total absence of guns in one’s possession can guarantee safety, the opposite is happening: people engage in what can only be described as panic buying and ammunition hoarding. People are buying guns out of fear. Television feeds on this fear, featuring shows that feed on fear, pitching the message that there is no one and nothing we can trust, not family, not neighbors, and certainly not the authorities.
Yes, there is reason for fear because we have created a world that now can, at any moment, tip into disaster. But the real ‘fear’ is missing: there is no longer the fear of the Lord. The angels in Bethlehem’s fields, who appeared at the shepherds there to announce the birth of Jesus, started with the words: “Fear not.” When Jesus was confronted by heavily armed soldiers to arrest him and Peter pulled a gun injuring one of the guards, Jesus healed the man and said the memorable words: (Matt. 26: 22) “they who draw a gun will be killed by a gun”. Remember also Jesus words of turning the other cheek?
People are afraid.
These people are afraid. Ignorance breeds fear. People no longer know what Jesus has said about violence. Thanks to TV and the conservative media and, especially, the gun industry they are convinced that the time is coming when sales of weapons, particularly some types of weapons will be restricted or forbidden. They are afraid of growing populations of people they don’t trust. Some are even afraid that a time will come when they will have to defend themselves against the government itself.
Harper and other right-wing politicians use fear to control them. Fear of the unknown, fear of what’s different, fear of change. But also fear of communists, fear of muslims and fear of people who have different skin colors, customs, rituals and cultures. We possess a myriad of -often dormant- fears, and it is very easy to play into them, and get people to support those who promise to protect them. “Trust me, I’ll keep you comfy, I’ll make sure things stay just the same.”
Fortunately gun laws are different in Canada. If I were to buy a gun I would have to write an exam, undergo a thorough character test, and face all sorts of obstacles before I can lay my hands on this lethal weapon. Thanks God. Gun-related deaths here are a fraction of those to our Southern neighbor.
There fear is winning, even though crime is down. There fear is winning and so are massacres because these don’t lead to fewer gun sales, but more. There fear is winning, induced by anti-government militias and hate groups. There fear is winning with the result that there are now close to as many guns in the USA as people — with the gun industry producing millions more each year. There they have reached a supersaturation point as a culture. And with that many guns in circulation, too many will invariably make their way into the hands of people with ill intent.
If you have read my writings for a while then you know that the future does not look bright: on the contrary, We are approaching the end of an era: a time when economic growth, that goal that politicians always promise but are now unable to achieve, will cause increasing hardship. The debt we have created, not only to the environment but also on all levels of society, and I refer to monetary debt here, must be repaid in one form or another. Chances that we will have a severe recession, even a depression, are increasing exponentially. Already we see an immense increase in natural disasters, either too much or too little rain, resulting in extra costs and extra taxes. People will become more afraid, and have real reason to be so. They will not turn to the Lord and accept what is to come as signs that the return of the Lord is near, and greet these signs with delight and anticipation. No, with an increasing lack of biblical insight, their fear will turn to more violence and with the massive amount of lethal weapons everywhere mass murders will become commonplace.
What to do?
With physical violence we can turn other cheek, as Jesus did, but with bullets flying around, once one cheek is hit, that’s it. That’s the reason the bible advises us to avoid the conflict altogether: “Come out of it” the Bible advises repeatedly, both in the New Testament, Revelation 18: 4, and in the Old Testament, both in Isaiah and Jeremiah. We don’t have to court danger. It is prudent to run from it. Jesus himself, apparently referring to destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, advises his people to get out of the city while there is yet time. The mentioning of ‘the great desolation of which Daniel speaks’ in that ominous chapter of Matthew 24 – I advise you to look it up and read it aloud – refers to world-wide pollution, not only the senseless killing by guns, but also Climate Change that creates havoc everywhere. There too Jesus reminds us to seek refuge somewhere else.
“Come out of it?”
That is easier said than done. In Jesus’ time people mostly lived in small villages. Then only Jerusalem was a large city.
Today almost everywhere people are city dwellers. The Chinese government has relocated hundreds of millions to the cities, even constructing some 70 million apartments where nobody lives. Coming out of the cities and flee the violence and safeguard one’s existence has become almost impossible. Cities have the jobs. Farming has become big-city enterprises. Although I have some ideas, it calls for imaginative and communal thinking to find an answer there. Perhaps there is no longer an answer. Perhaps the existence of cities is an unnatural phenomenon: Cain was the builder of cities! He killed Abel, the first murder victim, who was a country fellow. The city kills the country. Violence against the first human being was the start of the death of nature.
More about that next week.