A Time Change?

            Today is March 13, 2011; at 2:00 AM this morning the time changed to 3:00 AM. I wasn’t awake to see the change; I slept through it. Usually when there is a time change from Standard Time to Daylight Savings or vice a versa I ask Vickie if she is going to stay up and change the clocks at 2:00 AM. I also threaten to call friends at 2:00 AM to remind them to change their clocks.

            I didn’t feel the time change. Oh, I’ll probably feel it today and tomorrow having lost an hour’s sleep, but I didn’t feel it change at 2:00 AM. We reset the clocks before retiring, and as I write this I note that the computer reset its clock; the cell phones have the correct time as well. 

            The time change occurs in the midst of other time changes; Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Wisconsin, Japan, New Zealand; the codification of human relationships beyond the pale of Divine sanction; the termination of life on utilitarian grounds without regard to its Divine origin; the debasing of mankind into programmable mechanistic resources and behaviorist systems walled in and walled off from the transcendent. 

            The Japanese know that a tsunami has hit; they don’t need our thoughts, they need our intercessory prayers and material assistance. The rest of us have been in the midst of a tsunami for years and don’t know it; one house of consumption falls and we build another; a socio-political edifice crumbles and we erect what we think is a better and more enduring one, only to see it swept away. Blind to transcendent truth, intoxicated by sensory consumption, infatuated by ourselves; we congratulate ourselves for ourselves the way asylum inmates congratulate themselves on being Napoleon, Elvis, or Einstein.

            The contradictory cry of the world is, “Give me nihilism or give me death!” Nihilism is death; death to meaning, death to beauty, death to transcendence, death to joy, death to love, death to family, death to marriage, death to life, death to character, death to personhood, death to dignity, death to coherent social fabric. We have assumed a collective Kevorkian persona, collective assisted suicide as we drain the image of God from ourselves and replace it with embalming fluid.

            Perhaps when we are finished and laid in our collective casket the lions and tigers and bears will say, “Oh, don’t they look good.” Then again their commentary might be, “Damn fools.”