God in the Disunited States of America

(in which the author gets a life-time pass to the NSA's hit list. And God's.)

So it's 2007 and our lives are color-coded for ease of use. Blue means latte-sipping urban atheist, and Red means Big Mac chowing, bible-thumping country bumpkin. While all stereotypes claim basis in truth, we might need to start using our minds again. It's time to move past this archaic dichotomy of a paint-by-numbers country that's been shoved down our throats by the media. And Jesus.
I hate glib idiots as much as a I hate myself, but I'm about to offer a little unsolicited perspective on the "God" issue. First, it wouldn't matter at all if this very deity (or lack thereof) wasn't rendering our nation a loathsome circus whose respect from the rest of the world is falling as fast as [insert clever comment about an anorexic/obese celebrity's weight here]. The middle east hates us because we're godless, and Europe hates us because we're too religious (i.e. stupid.) Obviously our president is such an authoritarian idiot who would be so easily dismissed as a mindless puppet if he was not the (self-proclaimed) "decider" (and a "born-again Christian"). At least he's been successful in making 300 million people also look like idiots (while only 51% of them actually are) and claiming thousands of lives in the process. And we can rest-assured that God speaks through him.
Which leads me to my next point: those red/blue zealots/heathens are all wrong, i.e. soulless tools of the political machine we like to call democracy.


First, the Jesus freaks, because they're easier: the world was not created with you in mind. Join the twenty-first century and realize that there is no heaven, your suffering is not a punishment or a test from god. There is no kindly old white man sitting in the clouds over Kansas looking out for your best interests. God is not God. America is not God. You are a mass of biological systems and tissue, not the incarnation of God's image. You're making us all look bad, so stop it. The fact that they let you into this millennium is actually quite puzzling (wasn't the rapture supposed to occur anyway?). You are ruining this country.

And then we we have the other end of the spectrum-- the self-obsessed corporate hacks who go to bed with their laptops, wake up for Starbucks and drive to the office while listening to the Dow Jones report. If this sounds familiar, you might even go to church once a year to pretend that you stopped thinking about yourself for an hour. You are also ruining this country, and justifying Ann Coulter's existence. I would be happy that you're not having kids if that didn't mean the population below the Mason-Dixon line is sure to eclipse the entire country soon.

Here are two extremes: the absence of critical thought, relic from an age presumed dead, and the morally vacant automaton. And in this America, each encourages the other to more fully retreat into these roles, moving further from any sense of unity or belief in anything outside themselves (or their Christian god, always on America's side).
They're more alike than they are different, both blind ignorance: the opposites are joined in their obsessive identification with the media-constructed poles of contemporary American culture. So comfortable in inhabiting these roles, they forgot to actually exist outside their hate of themselves and each other. The god-loving or -loathing seems at this point more of a political tool than anything; each is only defined and legitimized by its opposite. Both signify the end of the world.
So what then? Let's open our eyes, stop ignoring the world outside our own narrow, color-coded sense of it, see past god/not god, self/other hatred and realize that we are all part of one whole: one country, one race, one system of living beings. "Right", stop being hypocritical, self-righteous and stupid. "Left", stop being nihilistic robots. Be humans and live somewhere outside your own mind.

I only offer up these sentiments because (god)dammit the world's in bad shape and this aggressive fracture is kind of like smoking two packs a day when you've already had a lung removed. There has to be a middle ground-- or secession.



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