I Shall Be Released

Sunday morning. Maybe not always a day for worship but certainly a day for reflection. While many of us go to a house of worship  many others go to the networks to hear the nattering heads make sense of the weeks events. They'll be talking Libya and Japan this week. Back and forth they'll go. How do you create democracy? What do you do to prevent or mitigate natural disasters? Is nuclear power safe? They'll babble-on puffed up with the majesty of their own revealed word. They will spin a mighty tale about the horrors, or bet money on, the safety of nuclear power. They'll wonder aloud why it is so hard to get democracy to take root. Some will blame Obama because it's their job to blame Obama. Blame for what I'm not sure. Others will just defend their point of view sans interest in facts or morality.

I'm not interested in blame. Not on Sunday, not during the week. I am interested in numbers though, even numbers that are only accurate estimates. Numbers like 250, 7,500, and 250,000. If you didn't know those are the death tolls for the earthquakes in New Zealand, Japan and Haiti.



The talking heads probably won't make a reference to all 3 events at once anyway unless one of the more unhinged members of the pundit class (Beck?) wants to add a little tasteless fear of 2012 end times to your morning news fix. There is an elephant in the room that does tie these very different events together though. Poverty kills. New Zealand, modern 1st world country. Japan, modern 1st world country. Haiti, 3rd world hell hole. Scary nuclear reactors? 9.0 earthquakes? Bad. Poverty? The quake in Japan was bigger than the quake in Haiti by a factor of 2. There was no tsunami in Haiti. I'm willing to bet that 7,000 people died from the earthquake in Haiti last month, over a year after it actually happened. Poverty kills. It kills the body, it kills the spirit, it kills the future.

Those thundering turds on the morning bobble-head shows, and our politicians too for that matter, will never get us to the next level when they won't even talk about the real problems of our world. As for democracy do you really think it can thrive when the people can't feed their children, or spend a quarter of their day fetching potable drinking water?

I'll try to post something a little lighter, with a recipe, this afternoon. Sorry for going the heavy route this morning. Right now I need to go worship at the temple of breakfast. Mmm! breakfast. I was always a sucker for the King so here's a little up lift to get your day back on track. It was written by Englishman John Norton, was adopted by the abolitionist movement in that country, then became the peoples hymn  for both the equal rights and anti-war movements in this country. They probably sing it at your place of worship and your kids cub scout meetings. Nature can be destructive, but in the end only the face in the mirror can be the enemy.



If the talking heads ignored Japan and Libya I apologize, but I am away this weekend so I wrote this post Friday. My bad.