EJKs, climate change, pandemic — today’s version of the 10 plagues?

Five days before Christmas, of a year of unspeakable horrors, we awoke to the horror of witnessing the cold-blooded murder of an unarmed and helpless mother and her son by a trigger-happy cop, for no more compelling reason other than that he is a policeman.

I shall be telling this sad Christmas story with a sigh, ages and ages hence; I will repeat it till my tongue stiffens. Yet I don’t think I will ever know or understand why it happened. Why, for a great many men, killing people is as rote and routine as the killing of chicken for the dinner table. Why the sinfulness of men grow the more power or wealth they acquire. Why overarching pride in men like this crazed killer cop enables them to act as if one could go through life without minding what people will say about the evil deeds one did. Why men want to play God. And why, for many among us, the gun gives the final verdict and not Time, not History, not God.

We are now 7.8-billion-strong, a mad and maddened swarm of people crowding a very small planet, pushing other species to the brink of extinction. The works of God in nature and His creations and creatures are being decimated at an alarming rate. While polar bears starve to death on the dwindling ice, while birds fall like dead leaves from the toxic acid skies, while pods of whales beach themselves in a futile bid to escape our lethal seas, men of ill will on Christmas Day continued singing: “I don’t care!”

Our cemeteries are full of people who should be alive, and there are evil men living among us who shouldn’t be. The earth is dying because men don’t care. Men die because of men who don’t care.

Yet God cares. He does. He has now come to judge us and to convict us. Because we are all guilty, all will be punished. And so God let loose the evil wind that spread the pandemic now ravaging the entire world, the way The 10 Plagues laid to waste the grandeur and the glory that was the Egypt of the Pharaohs. It is an act of catharsis. Of purgation and of cleansing. A Great Flood of sorts, about to clean the soot and the dirt off the face of the earth.

God does not determine what kind of life we choose to live. Living bad is a choice, a personal decision. It is our free will’s sole determination. Being a giving God, He grants us our wishes and gives us what we want. Men are evil because they choose to be evil.

The sunset sky over this fake dolomite beach has turned blood-red. For shame it must be. Or for grief. Huge waves are spawned in the far horizon and, driven by the storm, they now advance shoreward very fast, full of wrath and full of anger, coming at us, coming for us, slamming against the rocks, slapping our faces. The hand of God.

Antonio Calipjo Go, [email protected]