Sunday Interlude and Sermon

Steinbeck wrote a book titled Moveable Feast, and I thought of it, as I provided a feast for the mosquitoes out at Fort Missoula. I was there before dawn one morning to photograph the iris garden. There must be over 200 varieties, a bounty for any flower lover. If you go out there, don't forget your citronella oil. If you go to shoot the iris, take some scissors or hand pruners to nip off dead blooms to clean up your frame.

The sermon for this lord's day comes from the trial of the Grace CEOs. I will not revisit or argue the verdict, but I will point out the common truth once more shown by it. As the world now stands, corporate profits are more important than human lives. People are being murdered everywhere to guarantee American corporations continue to stack up profits.

The bottom line dictated the invasion of Iraq, and it paid off well for the people who invested in it. Cheney and Halliburton made tons of money, as did several other big companies and the rich people who controlled them. A million dead meant more weapons sold, more profits, higher stock returns, and a huge victory for the free market. It is only one example of native people being killed to make the oil beneath their lands available for American industry to suck up.

The republic is dead; we are empire, the largest and mightiest the earth has ever seen. So has it been since the beginning of human history: empires rise and fall. Read Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It is a blue-print of where we stand and where we are going. The decline has already begun, our government is corrupt to the core, we are constantly fighting someone somewhere, mercenaries are doing more of the fighting and the rich get away with murder.

Our religious leaders are the same Pharisees and hypocrites Jesus dealt with in his time. They are greedy, lying tools of men who would rule the world. That's the reason church and state should be separated, because the leaders corrupt each other. Serving your religion requires serving your government, while the government makes superstition rather than reason the law of the land. They make a good team for controlling the masses...and making themselves rich.

Thus, we have people labeling themselves pro-life who will do anything to preserve zygotes, a handful of mindless dividing cells, claiming human life begins at conception, while ignoring the murder of real, thinking, feeling humans worldwide. Does that make sense?

We want the whole world to give us their natural resources, sacrifice their cultures and eat McDonalds, drink Coke or Pespsi, wear Nikes and Levis, watch our movies, buy our music, worship our god, believe our superstitions. Sometimes we kill them for refusing our generous offers.

Aren't those iris something. They were my mother's favorite flower and I inherited her collection, when she died. I doubled the size of the iris beds, over the next four years. That is one thing I do miss from Arkansas. There's a bunch out at Fort Missoula. Go see them before they are gone.