It seems the president has found a form of pollution he doesn’t like, and that is human beings.
At this point, you’d be forgiven for thinking that he loved destruction and pollution for its own sake. The Environmental Protection agency isn’t in the business of regulating for clean air or clean water anymore; the president doesn’t want to protect our plants or animals either. But this week, the president said that the EPA was going to cite the state of California, for the pollution known as… homelessness. Homeless people, according to the president, created “Tremendous pollution being put into the ocean because they’re going through what’s called the storm sewer that’s for rainwater, And we have tremendous things that we don’t have to discuss pouring into the ocean. You know there are needles, there are other things.”
Billion-dollar corporations who pump dangerous toxins into the air and water will be allowed to do so more easily now. The people who run them, who could live quite comfortably on what they already have, will be able to make more money while wreaking more havoc. They could afford to stop hurting people but they won’t have to. But the country’s poorest human beings, most of whom are poor because of the choices of the rich, are maligned as a danger to the storm sewers.
Why has Trump suddenly taken interest in the plight of the homeless? Because they’re an eyesore, of course. Days ago he spoke to foreign real estate investors about the issue. “We have people living in our … best highways, our best streets, our best entrances to buildings and pay tremendous taxes, where people in those buildings pay tremendous taxes, where they went to those locations because of the prestige,” he said, and ominously added, “policing may be an important tool to help them get off the street.”
Policing.
No one is exactly sure what the president has in mind. But we know what he’s done with poor men, women and children who come to us for help from foreign countries, even when they come here legally as asylum seekers. Now he’s talking in an alarmingly similar way about poor American citizens with nowhere to lay their heads– for the benefit of wealthy people abroad.
Meanwhile, around the world, millions of young people took part in Climate Strikes, protesting for drastic reduction in global carbon emissions before it’s too late. There’s no time to lose. They say the whole world is burning up.
And while this was going on, what did the president do?
He approved deploying United States forces to defend Saudi Arabia, at Saudi Arbia’s request. This is in response to drone strikes on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities.
The United States will not be deploying its military in a response to an attack on oil. Not on living things, but on the petroleum left over from things that died 150 million years ago. The sale of petroleum makes the world go round– the world that is burning up, in part because of petroleum. That’s what our military is going to kill people to protect. We’re going to protect oil, because oil is expensive.
In this world, which I’m told is self-destructing, money has value and life does not. Yes, the president is a particularly grisly example of this, but he’s just playing to the hilt what so many many people firmly believe: things that will make lots of money for people who have lots of money already, are precious and must not be disturbed. Rich people must be allowed to go on amassing riches, expensive real estate must go on being expensive, and petroleum must be kept safe from attacks. People who don’t have lots of money, such as homeless people, refugees, and economic migrants, must be “policed.” They must be locked away and removed from in front of buildings for fear of disturbing the monetary value of things rich people want. Some people, preferably the brown ones far away in foreign lands we can’t point to on a map, will have to be murdered by the American military. Plants and animals, which all humans need to survive, receive even less regard. We can slaughter them right and left. Beauty– the beauty of nature, I mean, not the beauty of buildings for rich people to buy– is worth nothing at all. They would gladly blot out the moon and the stars and the sunshine, if they thought they could make money off of doing so.
This is the spirit of the world.
The world worships mammon, and so finds itself making more and more sacrifices atop a pyre which is increasing in size by the day. That pyre threatens to devour the whole earth, if things go on as they are. But it will devour nature and beauty and poor people that nobody cares about first.
No one can serve two masters. You can either worship Christ Who loves you and gave Himself for you, offering His flesh to His disciples to eat for everlasting life, or you can worship Mammon which cannot love and which demands the death of living things to feed its ever-growing hunger. You cannot serve both God and Mammon. I realize this message has been a bit complicated, since the biggest worshipers of Mammon seem to flaunt their professed Christianity the most. I don’t think the heresy now calling itself the Prosperity Gospel is particularly new; it has been with us in one form or another from the beginning, but it has always been anti-Christ. Not only does it claim you can serve both God and Mammon, it claims that God is excited to give His most loyal followers earthly riches– thus making God Himself out to be a servant of Mammon. Many have been deceived, and many will go on being deceived. But it remains the case that the worship of Mammon is diametrically opposed to the worship of God.
The worship of Mammon sacrifices people to destroy the whole world.
I can’t say what will happen if we abandon Mammon and return to God, but I pray that we do.
(image via Pixabay)
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