A Good Friday, … Perhaps Not

A very attractive and seemingly enlightened Facebook friend posted a damning lament over the execution, almost two millennia ago, of a certain Jew by an evil people, perhaps not recognizing they were also Jews and perhaps ignoring that evil appears to be a constant among most peoples throughout most of history and in all probability, preceding it. And that while some very conservative faux Christians share her feelings, the very Christian people of Arkansas appear ready to execute seven other Christians in rituals whose immediate results are not all that different from the one she commemorates today.

Two millennia seem an awfully long time to hold tightly to hatred and a thirst for vengeance, but then again, perhaps so too are seventy some odd years, or even just sixteen.

In the news (or what passes for news today) the Deep State revels at the renaissance of bellicosity and the renewed hope for more and more international conflict, pride too at finally dropping the largest ever nonnuclear (for now) bomb on Afghan “savages” and destroying the cave complex the Deep State once built to fight the evil Soviets (now the evil Russians), and it only cost a total of about 34 million dollars for the bomb and about ten times that for the complex, a mere eleven million dollars per person killed. What a bargain. And great for an important segment of our economy.

Domestically hatred too flourishes, the Democrats are intent on showing that Republicans under Obama were mere amateurs when it came to generating hatred and disparagement and that power is not something to be relinquished in our purported democracy. “Divide and conquer” they shout, “and divide and divide some more”. And Republicans, being pinch a penny wise and a bit too shortsighted, are very, very pious, and that has to count for something too. Odd that on this purportedly Good Friday, a day dedicated to a purported once and future prince of peace and a comfort to the needy, so little of his grace shines through except in rituals he’d find meaningless if indeed he once existed. Ironic too that a purported beacon on a hill shines a sickly red light reflecting its ever more efficient capacity to generate torment for itself and even more so, for everyone else. But sharing is supposed to be a good thing, isn’t it?

I recall listening to a song a half century ago, it was a beautiful Christmas carol but in the background, one heard a television journalist reciting the litany of the nightly news, and the music faded while the volume of the news surged, and despair set in and hope seemed to fade. As it was then, it’s a good day for the evil, for the worst among us, smug in their perceived enlightenment and the comfort of their accumulated ill begotten wealth. Hypocrisy is a comforting blanket on chilly days and a delightful parasol when the sun is out but a bit too hot; eloquence and rhetoric much more useful than truth. Patience in the service of evil always seems to pay off. Only the good die young and nice guys always finish last.

Perhaps as it always has, it’s hatred that springs eternal.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2017; all rights reserved