06 November 2012

An Election Day Prophecy

Thank God this horrible presidential campaign season is almost over.  

Literally, thank you, God.

I've been paying attention to national elections since I was 16 in 1980. 

I was horrified when Ronald Reagan trounced my beloved Jimmy Carter.

I cast my first ballot in 1984 for Walter Mondale.  There were three of us in the whole state of Mississippi who did.

I spent two years of my undergrad career at the VERY Republican Ole Miss writing a weekly column for the school newspaper. . .wherein, I regularly berated Ronnie Raygun and dodged frat boy insults.

In 1988, I was house-sitting for my thesis director and planted Michael Dukakis signs in the yard of the house .

In 1992, I pasted my beat up old car with Bill Clinton stickers and did everything I could in my literature classes to indoctrinate my students into the joys of socialist utopia.

In 1996, I did it again.

Come 2000, I was a Dominican student brother and thought the election had been stolen from Al Gore.

Becoming Catholic and having the time and resources to study the tradition led me away from my fanatical Yellow Dog Democrat tendencies.  It also helped that the Dems had become increasingly fanatical about abortion and were sounding more and more like the Marxists I'd studied in grad school, i.e. totalitarian bigots.

By 2004, I was a weak Republican-leaning classical liberal. So, I held my nose, dosed up on Dramamine, and pulled the lever for a second-term for George W. Bush.

The election of 2008 proved too easy to even think about much. Barak Obama was an over-hyped, empty suit Nanny Statist with the thinnest resume of any candidate we'd seen in decades. John McCain was only slightly more palatable than Obama.

Now, here we are.  Empty Suit Statist vs. Empty Suit Corporatist.  To my mind, the Corporatist is slightly less odious simply b/c he's less likely to be as virulently anti-Catholic as the Statist.

We're discussing the Book of Amos for my OT class this morning. The prophetic history of Israel is replete with warnings about the nation's worship of foreign gods and its love of injustice. These two national sins--idolatry and oppression of the poor--bring Israel under judgment over and over again.

Here's my prophecy for today:  no matter who wins this election, we are a nation teetering on the edge of divine judgment.  I don't mean hellfire, brimstone, earthquakes, and swarms of locusts.  I mean, as we allow ourselves to slide deeper and deeper into worshiping the secular gods of Violence, Money, Prestige, and Power, and the longer we cast aside those who need our help n favor of entitlements, the colder and harder our hearts become.  Cold, hard hearts cannot receive the blessings God sends our way.  

When we can no longer receive God's blessings, we begin to think that we rule the universe and God serves us.

If the Church is to play her proper role as Prophet, we must untangle ourselves from our cultural alliance with the Nanny Statists in the Democrat Party, and we must resist allying ourselves with the National Security Corporatists in the Republican Party.  

Court prophets did not fare well in Israel.   
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3 comments:

  1. Anonymous9:35 AM

    Padre, edge of judgement? Nay, already in free fall! The punishment for sin are the consequences of sin. The punishment for 1,000,000 children killed in the womb every year and for thousands of innocent civilians killed in wars of choice every year and for dozens of criminals executed out of revenge every year is death. The fertility rate of American citizens is 1.6 child per woman, well below the population replacement rate and historically below the reversal rate. In the second half of this century, WASP culture will be practically dead and America will be mostly Catholic and Hispanic. And America will finally have a cuisine worthy this name!

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  2. Gregg the Obscure3:33 PM

    We had a similar political trajectory, but I went right by January 1993, disgusted by Clinton's capitulation to the "gay pride" lobby.

    Both the major parties belittle the natural habitat of people: the family and the Church. For the slightly less left party, that party, businesses, military and police organizations fill the void. For the farther left it's their party, the infotainment industry, the euthanasia industry, the environmental cliques and the "civilian" organs of government. Some of those substitutes (excluding the euthansia industry of course) can be useful, but none of them can ever take the place of family and/or Church.

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  3. Cathy D2:19 PM

    I apologize for my appalling lack of scripture knowledge, but wasn't there something in the Old Testament about the Israelites begging for a King? The response was basically, 'you get what you ask for'. That's what I thought about this morning.

    I heard 50% of Catholics voted for Obama. Not surprising.

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