Nine Minutes and Twenty-nine Seconds

Nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds. What kind of man would press a knee into the neck of another man for so long a period of time and think it is okay? And it isn’t like he did it in his basement. Officer Derek Chauvin did it in broad daylight, on a city street, with people gathered all around. He had no shame. I am a bit surprised Chauvin did not look around foolishly as he kneeled on Floyd’s neck, and say to the onlookers, “What?”

Chauvin is the police. These people – not all of them, but more than you might imagine – suffer from a sense of entitlement that rivals the privilege conquering soldiers have exerted over defenseless villagers for centuries, carrying with it the atrocities that have filled out countless campaigns. 

It is a beastly thing, this misguided sense of power – not imbued by God, but bestowed by men upon men who seemingly have no way of preventing such delusions of self-might from seeping unencumbered by conscience, into their brains. This reckless privilege has spawned a horrific culture of fear, death, and racial animus that is nowhere so pronounced as here in America.

Yet, in many of their minds, these police are simply “heroes”. When challenged, they simply become “misunderstood heroes” – mistreated and under-appreciated. They rarely feel remorse for their actions. Mostly, they feel disdain for what they view as political lynching. In their minds, they assume the posture of sacrificial lambs, and they feel every bit as innocent

Space, Sin, and Astrophysicists

Top astrophysicists promote the “Big Bang Theory” – that the universe sprang into existence in a single instance some 15 billion years ago. I doubt that. But, then, I am often at odds with things learned men and women say about the universe. That may sound strange considering they hail from the cream of the astrophysicists’ crop, while I am fathoms removed from the bottom rung. Nonetheless, I have my own theory.

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The bigger the house, the more empty the home. With that in mind, you supposed “rich folk” might want to try a bit of downsizing, for happiness’ sake. 

 

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The problem with keeping people endlessly imprisoned is that prisoners will eventually lose the healthy disgust they feel for themselves, and begin to focus a more bleak disgust upon a system that feels compelled to punish. It is as though this hateful desire to punish others is ingrained into the state – into the very hearts of its politicians and its citizenry; having proven itself, somehow, to be elemental to America’s psyche, like destiny, and beyond the realm of mere mortals to right. 

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This vaunted “Space Force” idea America is wont to pursue – a design to militarize Earth’s outer orbit – is shameless. It will amount to nothing more than a build-up of capacity to unleash high-tech weaponry down upon this Earth – to bombard our poor and precious planet from a greater distance than we already bombard it today. 

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This is simple: It would seem that any time we propel ourselves forward in space, we experience time travel. The store is a mile from where I stand. It will take an hour to walk there. I get into an automobile that travels at 60mph, I am there in one minute. That store is in my future. By being propelled forward in an automobile, I am thrust 59 minutes into the future, during which time I age one minute instead of one hour. 

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In John 8:11, Jesus said to a sinner, “Go, and sin no more.”  I think I can do that.