Be Angry at the Sun

Recently, it's been the case on a number of mornings, as my roommates and I coalesced in the living room over bong rips and coffee, that I've found myself screaming at the top of my lungs at my computer screen. It generally happens when—after I get excited from watching the latest video of Bernie Sanders laying down truth bombs about the state of the American experiment—Aileen reminds me that the only politician I've ever dared to trust doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of winning the Democratic nomination for the presidency. How is it possible—in a country that is so obviously being run into the ground by its own blind faith in capitalism—that the only man in all the government who votes based on his actual values, as opposed to the marching orders handed to him by moneyed interests, is doomed a year before the primaries even begin? What just and loving God would allow us a choice that was not the same old, sold-out political hacks and immediately make that option completely unviable in the scope of a national election, simply because nobody knows who he is?

Perhaps it is not God I should be cursing. After all, it wasn't God who replaced all the textbooks in Texas (and, by extension, half of the country) with evangelical propaganda. No omnipotent being made reality shows like 19 Kids and Counting among the most lucrative commercial entertainment formulas of the last decade. It was not the words of a divine Lord and Creator that decreed the majority of our country would be more riled up over a fixed boxing match than the steadily more frequent and violent natural disasters taking place around the world.

God didn't do that. You did it. I was complacent in it, too, make no mistake. We live in a time where all of the information is at our fingertips, so long as we know to ask, but most of us choose not to care.

Of course, if I'm being honest, this isn't the righteous rage of someone who knows better. It's the petty, jealous rage of a child who doesn't think it's fair. I can't ignore the ugly parts. I can't hear the words, "That's just how it is," without immediately retorting with, "Yeah, but…"

But I have no solutions. Only rage. The only solace I've found is in the words of American poet Robinson Jeffers, who wrote about a concept he called "inhumanism," or the idea that mankind isn't essential to the universe and that perhaps God is not especially concerned with us. I'll leave you with a few lines by Jeffers, for the moments when the rage is just not enough:

"Be angry at the sun for setting/If these things anger you…/Man plays his part; the cold passion for truth/Hunts in no pack.…/Let boys want pleasure, and men/Struggle for power, and women perhaps for fame,/And the servile to serve a Leader and the dupes be duped./Yours is not theirs."

Santa Fe Reporter