And so we struggle out of the mudslides of North Carolina looking for something, and we spin out of the tornadoes of Iowa and look for something that we desperately need. We are covered with ashes as we climb out of California and where is it? That thing that always gets us out of the disasters.
And so we come to the end of 2024, and this is the end of two years of heat-waves so utterly off-the-charts that the computer modeling by climate scientists is declared by the Director of NASA to now be useless. The Earth is stopping our search for the magic American future. The Earth is out of our control. The Earth is too hot to compute.
The Earth is even stopping the United States. The allocation of $18 Billion to FEMA is not making it through the hurricane season. Deaths from Hurricane Helene, a confirmed climate change storm, is up in the hundreds of souls, as the Appalachian hollers are pouring innocent bodies into the valley.
But where is this deliverance for us? We are bored with this disaster. We search for our constant American re-invention. When the tornado lifts us into the air – we can just switch channels. Our eyes search the screaming horizon, where is the gated community that the super-rich promised us?
Where is the pure product of America? Where is the Standard and Poor 500, the great solid corporations with their lines of products that nostalgize the past and dream a future of good looks, convenience, status, youth, status and power. We are waiting as the water rises past our tits. USA! USA! Please turn this storm into movies and books and video games….
I named my boy the United States and told him to take Ibuprofen for his pain. “Young man, electrify the border of our leafy suburb, get the young Blacks out of our park, slam the jail door shut on the tornadoes and inject fire retardant into the California sunshine.”
We can’t keep fighting our false battle, the game show of American identity. Each of our 800 military bases around the world, each has its own super storm now and it will dawn on all the men and women serving their country that the only nation-state is not a nation at all. It is the Earth.
The lie that we have been living becomes love in the wind of the storm. The Earth’s alchemist re-evolves us. We will love the Earth as peace is the discipline that tends our garden.
Rev. Billy