God Told Me to Tell You This

The peoples of the Earth, led by the United States, are concentrating wealth in the hands of a small percentage of the people. You may ignore this more than you deny it, but even if you deny it, as time passes, you go on having less and less of the wealth — and suffering as a result. You do not deny or ignore that result. Consequently, you’ll likely want to find something or someone to blame other than those hoarding all the money.

The temperature of the Earth is rising ever more quickly, resulting in more storms, floods, droughts, and heatwaves. You may enthusiastically deny this, or — having abandoned that as hopeless — deny all the obvious human (and agricultural) causes for it. But it goes on happening, and it’s very unpleasant, and it’s horrifically frightening for the future of your loved ones. So a vague notion is likely creeping around in the back of your skull, the notion that somebody needs to be blamed for some unknown evil.

The risk of nuclear apocalypse keeps climbing. You almost certainly ignore this far too heartily to be obliged to bother denying it. But that does not mean you’re necessarily completely unaware of it. Nor are you completely unaware of all the wars/genocides being visited upon the world by a highly profitable weapons industry and its servants in government. This is an evil whose existence fundamentally depends on misassigning blame for it; were war not entirely the fault of designated enemies, were it a collective error for which your side was partly at fault, war couldn’t continue to exist much longer.

Now, you may have heard that I — God — want you to focus on blaming foreigners, immigrants, refugees, ethnicities, races, women, gay people, trans people, educated people, people not of the proper religion, and so forth. You may have been told that the problem is not the mountains of gold being stashed away on Wall Street but the crumbs being picked up in an alley on the poor side of town. You may have studied carefully and discovered it to be my will that the word of sadistic, misogynistic, closeted homophobes with arrest records longer than their limousines be believed without basis. And they may have decreed that destruction of the Earth — whether by methods slow or rapid — is good and just.

Or you may have taken on the task of trying to correct the misguided, spending your days rejecting racism and sexism and every form of bigotry — except perhaps xenophobia, because you don’t oppose wars or fighter jets or hamburgers “for God’s sake” (as you tend to say).

I’m here (or, you know, somewhere) to tell you to focus. I command you to look to the heart of the matter. Your opinion on your divide-and-conquer issues may be very noble and good, but it cannot change the fact of your having been divided and conquered by those laughing all the way to the bank. My advice to you is this: follow the money, believe your own eyes, and never ever listen to anyone who claims to be conveying the statements of imaginary beings.

• First published at Davidswanson.org.