Most of us are living in a continuous realm of denial about how bad it really is, and about how powerless we really have become. As Americans, we have it in our cultural DNA that we are a can-do, infinitely creative people who can always reimagine a solution to a problem. We are Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise, and we’ll find a way to go where no one else has gone before.
The truth is that we Americans are no longer very good at can-do, imaginative solutions. We’ve become destructive, not creative. We’ve become a war-mongering, death-infatuated, sadistic, cruel, ravenous cancer attacking the earth, its creatures and its foundational infrastructure. We’re now the enemy of the future, and it keeps getting worse. We are not better off than we were 10 years ago, nor even five years ago. The nations are in a state of permanent war and Mother Earth is dying. But very few of us actually care. After all, this could be the year the Mariners take it all!
But a few fools actually do care. And even though they have no power or ability to change our suicidal way of life, thankfully that doesn’t stop them from trying. After all, since we’re all gonna die anyway, we might as well, at least, die well. And with that sober realism let me invite you to become an April Fool, and get out in public bearing witness to our love for this earth, its peoples, lands and creatures.
At noon on April 21, members of Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action and several other groups will gather in Westlake Center Park to enact a symbolic street-theater performance depicting a memorial service for the earth. Black-robed, monk pallbearers will vigil around a large casket containing a replica of the earth. A eulogy, describing the earth in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, will be read while mourners toss flowers onto the casket.
The gathering monks and mourners will then carry the casket along the sidewalk to the Henry Jackson Federal Building, where they will perform the same mock funeral again before visiting the office of Senator Patty Murray.
This act of mourning will call attention to the increased danger of nuclear war following recently announced U.S. plans to spend $1 trillion on modernizing its entire nuclear weapons arsenal over the next 30 years. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that this ill-advised policy will provoke a “new arms race” in this time of wars and rumors of wars.
But our sadistic military strategists, along with their Wall Street partners, want just that. They want to go where no one else has gone before: the final solution of eternal silenced order, the final solution of death. Our Wall Street war machine is unhinged from morality.
We’re in the land of demons now, and Captain Kirk is no longer at the helm. n
Rev. Rich Lang is the Pastor of University Temple United Methodist Church and can be reached at [email protected].