The prudent cultivates wisdom but the fool dons folly for a crown.
Year 2015 is gone and irretrievable. It can only be remembered, revered or regretted, but never relived. What we did or failed to do stays where and as it is. Action lies in the future. The past may guide but never again can it serve as the canvas upon which we paint our lives.
We invest a deep importance to the end/ beginning of a year that defies ethics andempirical evidence. Across the great sweep of history, these annual exit and entry dates loom no more important than any other moment. They are not weighted by the crush of great events more than another point on the calendar. Yet, weinject them with a mystical quality as if the portal from one year to the next has an inherently different impact on the course of human affairs than the portal from any day to the one that next follows it. The dynamics of physics and astronomy are turned into a rush of heightened religious expression. The remnants of paganism still drag behind us. In some ways, we have not graduated from Stonehenge and those ancient monuments deifying that which moves about in the firmament.
As the year ends, prophets become flush with prophesies and preachers declare the coming year will be the year of this or that marvelous happening. The lay crowd is counselled to take stock of their ways and to pledge to correct that which is bad or in disrepairregarding their personalities. None of this is inherently bad but all of it is terribly incomplete.
If one waits until year’s end to perform these rites, then one has waited too long. Unless these exertions are persistent throughout the year, delaying until one instance infused with a dramatic but artificial climax will prove an inadequate device. To strenuously examine your moral compass once yearly is to subject it to erroneous disuse. By the time you view it, you may be so severely misplaced that the assessment may no longer be of any curative utility; at that point, it may only serve as a crying towel to weep regret for adhering too firmly to a path too incorrect to follow.
The passage of a year is merely the track of the earth’s revolution around a sun which itself is slave to movement through the universe. It is a physical event. The correlation between the movement of these orbs and the interactions of social man is tenuous. It has no more bearing on the quality of our social relations, how man treats his fellow man, than if we elect to measure time by how long it takes a tethered goat to walk backwards around a pole.We waste the better part of a year waiting until the end of the year to be our better selves.
Though no more imbued withmoral significance than any other moment, I admit the end of the year is a good time to take stock. It is consensus and convenient accounting measure, but one not to be infused with any greater cosmic or spiritual elevation than we would give the annual financial audit of a business firm. It is the action and quality of the auditing itself not the timing of it that is of import. Here, we must gauge whether, on the winepress of human strivings, we have advanced, fallen by the wayside or remained in place.
Globally, 2015 was a year of regression. The world became a more dangerous habitation as the West angled closer to direct confrontation with Russia over Syria-ISIL. America and its European and Asian allies nearedthe completion of comprehensive treaties creating economic blocs that seek to isolate Russia and China. Establishment of these intimidating blocs and the transfer of traditional aspects of sovereignty from the state to the private sector the enabling treaties portend will likelyburden African efforts to industrialize. Meanwhile, Africa sits poorer due to falling commodity prices.
Geopolitics and skewed economics conspire against all but a small portion of mankind. With few exceptions in 2015, the machinations of power and might suppressed the entreaties of justice and compassion.
The exceptional occurred in Nigeria.Despite the bitter gruel of venal governance they had been fed down the years, Nigerian people clung to their faith that life can improve; they voted in a new government. For this reason, the Nigerian voter is my person of the year.This new government must now perform under conditions of steep adversity. There are signs of promise as well as concern as this government takes shape. It must not faint but it must not bluster.
Governance is a most human endeavor. There is no infallibility in it. The lone act a man perfectly consummates is but death. All else is a fluid admixture of success and setback. The best thing this government can do is work to better the lot of the people. The second best thing is to recognize that it is imperfect; some of the programs it tries will not go as intended. That is no disgrace nor a sign of godly disfavor. The people have for a long time withstood the onslaught of bad government purposefully trying to wrong them. They can well stomach the errors of a government that sincerely intends their wellbeing.
Government should not cover its missteps or stubbornly adhere toa failing course. If something does not work, jettison it.Create another program. Wed not itself to preconceptions but to desired results. The best policy is empirical success not political excuse. Unlike other governments, do not attempt to defend something that is manifestly wrong or indefensible.
Do not try to distort reality to fit with your program. Make your program fit reality. This is how an organic connection between government and the people is created. Given the resilience of the Nigerian people, there is nothing that government can explain that the people will not accept. The people will stick with government as long as government is square with them.
As such, the Nigerian change of government provides potential solace. The rest of the year’s landscape is rather dismal terrain. A partial reason for this sorrowful state is the bankruptcy of moral leadership in most nations. The clergy worldwide has abetted and not fought this decline. With the visible exception of the Pope, most Christian leaders have chained themselves to the ways and thoughts of the establishment as if in voluntary servitude.
The behavior of Nigeria’s Christian leadership during the election is of record. Many embarrassed themselves, revealing themselves more as vessels of prejudice than piety. Others became outright mercenary, their behavior the stuff against which all ethical proverbs and aphorisms give stark counsel. As many clerics here accepted the illicit coin, their frocked brethren throughout the world fared no better. Most clerics sheepishly tracked behind the Western establishment on two vital issues – economic policy and foreign affairs – issues that will determine the destiny of billions of people.
All claim to emulate Jesus. If so, I must be reading the wrong bible. The Jesus of my Bible did not march in lockstep with the masters of the city. When he entered Jerusalem for the last time, he did the unthinkable. He openly challenged their avarice. He entered the temple, upending the tables of the moneychangers and chasing thecorrupt from his Father’s house. The priests and the moneymen had turned the holy place into a waystation of usury and exploitation.
The temple had been turned into Wall Street. Jesus more than occupied it; he turned the Street on its very head. That the moneychangers plied their trade in the temple compounded their infraction. Their commerce was wrong regardless of place. He called them “thieves” not pragmatic businessmen who set up proper shop in an improper place. The economic system they led was unjust.
That economy is no more unjust than today’s. Man has harnessed the power of nature and knowledge to press forth unprecedented levels of wealth and goods. Yet, the number and percentage of people rendered poor and hungry by the artificial constraints of the economic system -and not by the imperatives of objective lack – is unprecedented.
The Evangelical community says nothing about this. It does not rail against such injustice. It accepts the merciless capitalist system as somehow ordained from above even though no heavenly voice ever proclaimed such a thing. This clergy beckons to this congregations to enlist in a sort of divine lottery. Accept the system as it is. Just supplicate.More importantly,make sure you pay your obligations to the corporal church and you may be one of the few who are blessed beyond measure.There is no talk of making the world better or striving to inject compassion, mercy and justice into the life of mankind at large. The message is make sure you pay your religious dues and you may get a blessed payday, a divine dividend. Sadly, there is a sense of the casino in all of this.
No major Pentecostal leader questions the debt-laden nature of our economic and financial structures, although it is this quality that has brought the global economy to serial crises and has impoverished hundreds of million who ought not to be. These leaders have wedded themselves to the system and its inequity. They support it. They love Jesus; yet they bank and banquet with the devil. Thus, they never upend the tables. They just watch intently to assure they get their fair cut. They even pay honor to people of great money and power before the congregation of ordinary men who are made to gawk in awe at the venal display.
There is no rich man ever embarrassed out of church or publicly rebuked for the stained origins of his trove. Money and power are made blessed regardless of the origin and manner of their accumulation. These clerics assert that they preach the gospel. That might be true. They just don’t live it. Words are sonorous; they also are mostly air. Deeds and work are the bedrock, the hard evidence, of belief and faith.
When it comes to casting aside the yoke of poverty from the people, the message these leaders give adds greater burden. They ask people to give more and more in offerings but fail to question why the people earn less and less. The people are cajoled to make more bricks with less straw as if this is the way of Providence instead of that of Pharaoh. These men are today’s Pharisees. So closely glued to the establishment, they cannot see how they have replaced the ways of the gospel with those of greed. The Jesus they claim to follow more closely resembles mammon from this vantage point. Better to hold firm to a boulder cast into the sea than follow these people who delegate one eye on the Bible but plant both eyes on the till.
The other unfortunate gap is in the area of foreign affairs. Too many Christians took perverse enjoyment denigrating Islam as a religion of violence due to the existence of vile Boko Haram, ISIS and Al Qaeda. Candidates in American presidential primaries even speak of banning Muslims, including American citizens, from entering the country.
While libeling Islam as a religion of death and violence, these people seem blithely ignorant of the wanton violence done by leaders of nations supposedly guided by Christian principle. Perhaps these clerics should spend less time ridiculing Muslims and more time cleaning the scarlet corridors of their own house. They would find a rogues gallery camouflaged in the attire of statesmen, prime ministers and presidents.
Christian George Bush launched a massive war against a sovereign nation that was not a threat to his. He did so based on a lie. Hundreds of thousands perished needlessly. The decade before that, western sanctions against that same nation, Iraq, materially contributed to the premature deaths of over 200,000 children and likely many more. For over a decade, American drone bombs,ordered by born-again Christian presidents,have slain untold numbers of innocent, unarmed people who never lifted a finger against the West. Their deaths have been perfunctorily dismissed as collateral damage or as those of presumptive terrorists simply because they were in physical proximity to suspected terrorists.
The term collateral damage sounds clinical. It is a euphemism mounted atop a deep brutality. There is nothing clinical about an exploding bomb. The incendiary may be the product of man’s most advanced technology; but the fury unleashed precipitates a carnage of rare dimension. The bomb may be smart; it is also intrinsically savage. Such ordnance pierces bodies and burns internal organs, ripping off limbs and decapitating heads so as to render victims unrecognizable. More often than not, this orgy of fire and force leaves bodies so pulverized that they cannot be segregated from the rubble of buildings and the dust of the earth. Too often loved ones are left to bury a portion of a corpse, a solitary bone, or just the idea of the departed.
If we were to compute the numbers of innocent people the West has killed in its war against terrorism over the past twenty years, the numbers would exceed a million. At their present rate of carnage, the dreadful terrorists would need several centuries to equal the death toll that America and its league have achieved.
Yet there is no cry from the main Pentecostal leaders who claim to have severed their ties with denominationthat they may more freely and completely commune with God shorn of the distraction of empty ritual and bias. They may have shunned denomination. But they seemed to have replaced it with another unseemly bias. For them, nationalism and cultural prejudice trump spirituality and objective fairness.
In the West, those who committed this massive death are garlanded with praise although the sum total of their work has been to inch the world closer to mass disaster. Perhaps the hard-heartedness would be excusable if it resulted in peace and stability. But it has not. Iraq is a hot iron. Libya has combusted into anomie. Syria is a cauldron of misery and Afghanistan slips once more into chaos and fratricide. These are the fruits of their deadly labor. This tree cannot be allowed to further grow lest its blossoms consume us all.
I know not what to make of all this except that slaughter is now regarded as warfare, depravity as courage and evil as necessity. Imperceptibly, our humanity escapes from us like droplets of precious water evaporating under the midday heat. The problem is not that we are in the desert. The problem is that we have become the desert.
The truth be told, I hesitated a good moment before writing this piece. My flaws and transgression are manifold. I must ask forgiveness on an hourly basis. I write this not to appear as if I stand atop a moral promontory. To the contrary, we all are in the pit, walking through the valley of the shadow of death.
This piece is not an indictment but a plea, an entreaty to those who claim moral leadership to exercise that leadership as never before. The world edges closer to mayhem of frightful proportion. Persistent economic crisis is nigh inevitable so long as the system evades reform. War freighted with global repercussions is likely if powerful nations continue their hawkish ways. We need to step back from the abyss. There is no better time for the messengers of God to answer their calling than now. May they speak the truth before it becomes too late. Happy New Year.
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