“Let my people go.” Charlton Heston aka Moses
I decided to change my writing strategy slightly, not that you’ll notice or even care. Ever since my writing gig with the County ended last March, my dance card has been pretty blank. The majority of my “external” life came to an abrupt end. I think back to the time of Get Smart, a weekly television series and spoof on the whole spying thing. Back in the early days of the James Bond film franchise in the mid-sixties, good ole Mel Brooks and Buck Henry came up with this comedic take off. Anyway, it had the cone of silence, where “agents” could communicate.
I pulled down the cone on my writing, silencing the page, but not my mind. I had begun filling up my mind-time with daily additions to each story, which kept me engaged, while adding a certain disjointed feeling to them. So, this week, after coming up with my theme, I let it lie, with just a few sentences committed to it, allowing my writing mojo to grow in the word silence.
These days, the news is filled with a cacophony of catastrophic climate disasters. It struck me that these feel like biblical-sized stories, conjuring up the plagues visited on Egypt to let the Jewish people leave their enslaved existence. My erudition on this matter is a direct result of watching The Ten Commandments as a kid. Before becoming head of the NRA, Charlton Heston played Moses to Yul Brynner’s Pharoah in the film.
The biblical plagues in Egypt, as described in the Book of Exodus, were ten disasters sent by God to persuade Pharaoh to free the Israelites from slavery. These plagues included turning the Nile to blood, swarms of frogs, lice, flies, livestock disease, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and finally the death of the male firstborn. The cumulative result of their progression forced Yul to let Charlton and his people go. Ultimately, it was the final plague, the death of his first born that broke his will. It is very sad that those people, freed from bondage, have enslaved and murdered countless Palestinians.
Science has been the focal point for addressing the causes of our climate disaster. It hit me that there is a timeless poetry to what we are experiencing today. When you look at it this way, it changes the entire focus of attention. It takes the discussion to the highest level imaginable, giving it a holiness that beats the shit out of science. Nobody is talking this way, which is what struck me. We are treating each of our disasters individually, when there is an invisible, unifying linkage on a deeply, spiritual level.
True to my writing embargo, I didn’t get past the title, which set the tone for what would follow. My only transgression was listing our plagues, without counting. Divine mathematics got me to my list of ten. Truthfully, it surprised me, which I took as an affirmation from on high to get me on this story. As promised above, I sat on my hands for a couple of days and here we are.
Unlike the tale from the Book of Exodus, this is our doing, not God’s. The truth is we are the plague, the indisputable origin of our plight today. We are the sole source of the desecration of all that is holy. We have built our own spiritual prison, causing unconscionable suffering. I innocently began my list, focusing on nature’s cruelty, quickly realizing it is us. I am going to go through them in the unrehearsed, uncounted manner in which they were written.
Needless to say, they all come together with one single cause, but you gotta work with me here. The very first thing that came to mind are the red hot, scorching temperatures all over the world and certainly a big deal in our country the past few months for sure. Fires are the face of double digit temps. We are looking right into its burning, red eyes. They are making sure we see them in places never known for cataclysmic wildfires like these.
In contrast to our parched and denuded planet, we have flooding and its potential, caused by this very same climate kerfuffle. We can start with ice melts and the inevitable sea level rise, threatening every coastline. These same warming oceans inject more energy into the atmosphere, energizing the severity of potential storms, causing never before experienced damage. It often goes by the name El Nino and it’s coming for us.
While some could argue that the above list is the result of natural causes, it doesn’t take long to uncover how our actions have directly impacted human and environmental agony. I didn’t start out holding us responsible for all of it. Then, I bumped right into our hand in all these plagues. When I started summarizing human suffering, there we are, caught red-handed.
There seems to be a way more epidemic level of afflictions being visited upon our brothers and sisters all over the world. Of course, castrating US AID to countries that have relied upon it for years, is its own prescription for what currently ails us. I am not going to waste your time or mine by creating a list to justify this statement. It is everywhere you look. Starvation is just one word to describe a multi-headed monster wreaking havoc wherever it steps.
The hopelessness of human suffering and deprivation has spawned a level of violence that doesn’t even feel like news anymore, just more of the same. Mass shootings are now an everyday occurrence. We just count the number killed and move on to more important news, like the gilding of our house, the White House. It’s a total decimation of America’s birthing story and legacy, at the hands of an unhinged lunatic.
Of course, no way I can leave out greed and denial as causes and not symptoms. The reason why I put them together is they feed each and it doesn’t matter which causes what. Leaving things as they are, is especially attractive if you are directly profiting from the status quo. It is on the first page of the billionaire plague book. .
OK, I lost count on my list and at this point, why should it matter anyway? The extinction of so many living things is joined at the hip with our destruction of their environments in the name of progress. The voice of all these living beings gets drowned out by the chorus of greed and denial and its justification opera of oppression.
I think of Moses Heston’s quote about letting his people go. I think of it now, not as an escape from tyranny, but freeing us to embody our higher selves. Without embracing the God within us all, we are doomed to becoming a footnote in the life story of our planet. Ours doesn’t have to be a poisoned legacy if we begin looking for some higher guidance to get us out of this morass, millennia in the making.
You know, if we don’t think we are capable of being better than all this, we will be devoured by it. An unholy conclusion just doesn’t seem right to me and that is what got me going on this page.
Blessings
PS: This is my 550th story, a number so large, I can’t imagine having done it. I would like to congratulate myself for staying with it, since starting on Halloween night, October 31, 2011.
LISTEN TO IT HERE:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/admin/1292459/episodes/19649012-the-biblical-plagues-of-global-warming