“TAKE THE OMEN SERIOUSLY”
by OPOVV, ©2020
(Mar. 22, 2020) — “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to ‘The Pulse of the Nation,’ broadcasting from the little church on Hawthorn Street to hear Rook Dunkin’s Sunday sermon. Let’s listen in.”
“Good morning to you all, and will you please turn to your hymnal and sing along?”
“I Love Rock ‘n Roll” (2:55)
“It took billions of years for all of the billions of atoms to be arranged in such a way to make you you. So let’s consider the empty space between the spaceship we’re on – earth – to our nearest star – the sun – and the vast distances between the electron and whatever nucleus it’s going around.
“Now that we’ve contemplated emptiness, let’s turn our attention to the chocolate cake. There are many parts that must come together in the correct proportions that make it delicious, and each ingredient has a history just as amazing as your own. That molecule in the icing is no more important, and no less important, than any molecule that makes up your liver or knee joint. Atoms come together and form molecules by the pervasive electromagnetic energy that permeates the universe.
“See this coin? It has billions of atoms that were mined, smelted and then poured into a form that, when cooled, produced this coin. It is possible to retrace the family tree of one of the electrons that make up this coin, by the way, if we had the time and all of the information, just as your family tree can be traced back in time.
“We are aware that species come and go, as we are aware that we must gather food when we can to consume for a rainy day. We are not the only life form on this planet to do so: the bee makes honey in the summer to consume in the winter; the Chipmunk gathers when it can to eat when it can’t. The distinction between us and them, however, is that we can leave earth to go to another planet, while they are stuck here.
“So we have this information: the only thing constant in the universe is change. Change can be good or bad; depends on how prepared one is. If one knows that Montezuma’s Revenge doesn’t affect the indigenous but strikes wanderers, then it is wise to drink only bottled water. It is also wise to know that when one becomes infected with a virus, one doesn’t succumb immediately to its ill affects; that it takes time, hence the reason why airplane travel between vast distances may be convenient for some yet devastating for all.
“For the last hundred thousand years we have traveled across oceans and over mountain ranges; nowadays we cover what used to take many years in hours. We have traded our ability to develop immunities for expediency and convenience and, as we recently learned, paying the price. We’ve allowed people from the Middle East and from south of the border to invade us with drug-resistant variants of old diseases, recurring previously-eradicated disease, and brand-new ones that we have absolutely no defense against. We have voluntarily put our species in jeopardy for political purposes, perhaps the most selfish of all reasons whatsoever.
“We have left the door open for pandemics of polio and diphtheria; whooping cough and measles; smallpox and the plague, besides the ever-present typhus. We have let greed and misplaced allegiance to cloud our judgment of the difference between altruism and self-destruction. We have allowed greedy judges to wager our future; in short, we gave them enough rope to hang themselves, and now it’s up to follow through.
“Look at it this way: it’s a darn good thing we have Trump as our president during this crisis; had we another I wouldn’t be preaching and you wouldn’t be listening: we’d be censored, or dead.
“Think about all of the different ways we could die naturally, excluding old age: the leading cause of death for the Northwest American Indian was by a falling tree before the white man came on the scene. Voluntarily complicating the equation for longevity by introducing insanity is, by definition, insane. Professor Zorkophsky says that those who court insanity are insane themselves. Killing one another for some particular worldview in order to destroy ancient artifacts, is insane.
“What this all means is that even if we’re not all stupid, all of us are paying the price for the belief of stupid people, and open borders is just the tip of the iceberg. The opportunity for a pandemic is a recipe for specie extinction, and it would behoove one to take the omen seriously; there may not necessarily be a second chance. Another unmitigated fact of life is this: viruses have the ability to mutate into an entirely different animal that may act like a Medusa in disguise, meaning if you thought the first time around was virulent, just wait. Even Madam Shylock cannot predict the life cycle of an epidemic.
“Yesterday I received an email from the ‘Little People,’ from their enclave in the Adirondacks – they communicate with the outside world electronically because, to them, a letter our size would be like a billboard to us — that they are treating the lockdown seriously and not like our too many ignoramuses who don’t have the common sense to use common sense.
“Thank you for being such an attentive audience.”
“And that’ll do it for us and so, on behalf of the crew, I’ll be wishing you all, along with Rook Dunkin, a goodnight: Goodnight.
“Good speech. Burger time: my treat.”
“Bohemian Rhapsody” (8:12) (piano solo)