The alarm was
set to sound at 0530. Naturally, I woke
up at 0515.
I had an 0900
appointment to have an echocardiogram performed. I checked in at the appropriate desk at
0940. I was directed to a small waiting
area with a painfully loud television tuned to the paragon of journalism, Fox
News. Clustered together, a group of older
men, relative to me I assume, were complaining about Israel’s perceived lack of
a massive and costly response to the latest Hamas rocket attacks. The level of misinformation flying among them
was frightening. A small sample is
paraphrased.
“ “The Muslim President, Obama, won’t let
them respond to Hamas.
“God will take care of Israel – so says
the bible.
The Muslims don’t believe in the
bible. They’ve changed it
“You can’t change the bible, God
doesn’t allow it.
“The Catholics have changed the
bible after it was written by God.
And the kicker that almost pulled me
into the fray –
“The Jews changed the bible.”
Fortunately my name was called and I
was able to leave the den of idiocy that was ready to reduce any rational
person’s cerebral density to the equivalent
of cubic kilogram of inter-planetary
space.
I’m used to the relatively poor
caliber of information about planetary religions that exists here. What I am not used to, and will never be used
to, is the complacency that has emerged in the wake of the various religious
demagogues that has become the norm for the nation.
The idea that legends adopted from
several cults, woven into some semblance of continuity, and then translated
through several languages might somehow yield an accurate history and an
infallible source of authority when wielded as a tool or a weapon speaks too loudly
of the lack of concern for the facts that apply to nearly any situation. We wondered, during, the election, why no one
ever descended upon the apparent lies that issued from the Romney-Ryan and more
local GOP/teavangelists campaigns. There
seems to simply be no base knowledge of history, religious or any other, to
build upon. I believe that had I stood
up and thundered, “Torah, Talmud, Gospels, Roman, Douay, Quran!” “King James”the
men in that room with me would have wondered what I was talking about. Like others who contribute to the mental
morass that is American literacy, they have little to contribute beyond abject
confusion.
It must be remembered that their collective
concern for the Jewish State of Israel is not about the citizens of
Israel. It is doubtful that any of them
knows a Jewish American. Rather, their
interest is in the need for Israel to exist as an entity so that their “end of
days scenarios can be triggered and played out.
Beyond that, Rockets launched blindly
on a ballistic trajectory have fallen around Tel Aviv, and around
Jerusalem. The probability for Israeli
deaths is ramping up rapidly. 30,000
reservists have been called up for duty by the IDF. Shabbat Shalom!
No comments:
Post a Comment