In the Nov. 26 issue of The Nation, there is an item about remarks made by the Rev. Peter Laarman of the Judson Memorial Church in New York City, which, in my opinion, deserve comment.
“Among the reasons God may temporarily be unavailable to bless America,” writes Rev. Laarman, “(1) because God has had it up to here with the assumption that prayers for national exemption from pain and tragedy deserve an answer; (2) because God is too busy processing American’s prayers for their high school football teams; (3) because God takes for granted that the bombs falling on Kabul are America’s real prayers; and (4) Because such a tasteless and lurid efflorescence of red, white, and blue (including flags wrapped around church steeples) gives God a massive headache.”
Rev. Laarman expresses essentially some of my reaction to many of the super-patriotic catchphrases and statements being made today. My first reaction to “God bless America” is: “Which America? North? or South?” If North, why not include Canada and Mexico in our poignant plea? If (more probable) “America” refers to the United States of America, why do we restrict our plea to only one nation in the world? Why not add “God bless the UK,” or “God bless Rwanda,” a nation which desperately needs blessings from God as well as from the entire world.
If indeed there is a God who dispenses blessings, He/She has, millions of years ago, blessed our nation with natural riches of enormous quantity and usefulness. Examples: enormous forests which were here when the Europeans came to this continent, and which are 90 percent removed today, courtesy of American need for open farm land, logging practices, and the lust for profits; the enormous acreage of the Midwestern plains, some of which had 20 feet of topsoil when we began to farm them ruthlessly; and aquifers with billions of gallons of ancient deposits of water underlying the Great Plains but which now have restrictions placed upon further pumping because of the threat of water exhaustion in those aquifers, in some cases requiring millions of years to replenish. Add to that litany, the favorable climate for the agriculture of our land, as well as the tremendous deposits of mineral wealth, the grand scenery of mountains, prairies and oceans white with foam, with which we have been blessed, and I have a hunch that my position about blessings is at least reasonable, and possibly persuasive.
Lynnwood
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