The last essay was about the absence of any kind of discernible God in the things that happen on Earth. Some of the best examples of this are the natural disasters, such as the earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia in 2004, the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, and the ongoing devastation caused by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, right now.
A massive, 8.9 magnitude earthquake caused a tsunami (which is a Japanese word) about thirty feet high which, within minutes, had destroyed entire coastal areas in Japan on Friday, March 11. The news about it in America was rather spotty because we were worried about a wave, maybe a foot high, reaching Hawaii and California. After we were finished worrying about getting our feet wet, we started noticing the devastation in Japan. There were two thousand bodies on the shore just in Miyagi Prefecture. Thousands of people are homeless, many of them outdoors in near freezing conditions with just a blanket. Almost certainly, the death toll would have been as great as that in Indonesia (or as great as the Kanto Earthquake that hit Japan in 1923) were it not for the fact that Japan is the nation most prepared to deal with earthquakes and tsunamis. They were as ready as anybody could be. Which is to say, they were not ready. They are humans facing an overwhelmingly indifferent Earth.
There is no ultimate reason for events like this. It resulted simply from the fact that Japan, which was built by volcanoes, is near a place where one plate of the Earth’s crust slips underneath another one. In this location, perhaps a thousand years of pressure had built up. It was just geology operating in supreme indifference to the presence or absence of humans. It is ludicrous for us to try to figure out why God would permit this. Pat Robertson said that God allowed (caused?) the earthquake in Haiti to punish the people for the practice of voodoo. Robertson arrogantly assumes that he knows the entire mind of God. Blasphemous shithead. But aren’t many other religious people equally blasphemous for speculating that God must have had a reason for it? They think they know the mind of God, and that God must have been superintending the events in Japan these past few days. But maybe there is no reason; maybe it was just geology.
In other news: this is the birthday of President Andrew Jackson, born in 1767. Delusionary patriots consider him to be a beacon of democracy, but Cherokees know different. He used the United States army to forcibly remove the Cherokees from our homeland in what is now Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, defying the United States Supreme Court to do so. This makes him, constitutionally, a military dictator. During the course of the nineteenth century, the United States government broke hundreds of treaties with sovereign Native American nations, but only Andrew Jackson defied the Supreme Court to do so. The resulting Trail of Tears was not just a tragedy of suffering for the Cherokees; it was a tragedy for the American constitution. Jackson’s face on the $20 bill is the symbol of the American economy to the world; and it is the face of evil. We should get the face of that arrogant bastard off of our currency. Jackson makes Richard Nixon look like a saint.
Tomorrow (March 15) is the anniversary of the My Lai massacre. In 1968, some American soldiers deliberately killed a village of civilians in Vietnam. At least this was widely considered to be a criminal act; the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890 was considered to be a legitimate act of the United States government. Maybe we are getting a little bit more ethical; at least we no longer try to kill civilians, in Afghanistan, and the My Lai massacre was unusual (though apparently not unique) during the Vietnam War.
Oh, BTW, have a nice day.
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