America Needs To Hurry Up And Regret, So We Can Hurry Up And Repent

By Darryl L. Fortson, MD

"And afterward Moses and Aaron went in, and told Pharaoh, Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, let my people go, that they may hold a feast unto me in the wilderness. And Pharaoh said, who is the Lord, that I should obey his voice to let Israel go? I know not the Lord, neither will I let Israel go.....And Pharaoh commanded the same day the taskmasters of the people, and their officers, saying, Ye shall no more give the people straw to make brick, as heretofore: let them go and gather straw for themselves. And the tale of the bricks, which they did make heretofore, ye shall lay upon them; ye shall not diminish ought thereof: for they be idle; therefore, they cry, saying, let us go and sacrifice to our God. Let there more work be laid upon the men, that they may labour therein; and let them not regard vain words." - Exodus 5:2,3,6-9

Everybody is in a bit of a daze. The rapid, massive shifts to severe, absurdist policies. The abrupt slaying of DEI and their Federal workers placed on leave. The hunting of illegal immigrants in the most disruptive and terrifying way possible. The attacks on birthright citizenship. The money grabbing and the power flexing. The dismantling of civil rights. The expulsion of women from the membership of what it means to be human and self-determining. The abandoning of Federal obligations to Americans citizens decimated by natural disasters. The passion for violence toward the environment. The love of mercilessness, while we are being led by a man who swore an oath but would not touch a Bible. Folks are trying to make sense of it, but they can't make sense of it. "How do we fight this?," people ask. "How do we resist?"

Everybody has to do what they are called to do in this season, but I'm not going to do a whole lot of "resisting" right now. For one, I don't think it is going to change things much in this current point in time. But mainly, I am not going to do a whole lot of hopping around because I am seeing that the only way America is going to change is to have its heart pricked, and the only way that can happen is for there to be a broad and pervasive experiencing of consequence.

With the possible exceptions of the San Francisco earthquake of 1903 and the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, I don't think there has ever been a natural disaster that has affected a group of people as financially diverse as the LA fires have these past few weeks, including many of the people who have lost their homes being people of significant, and in some cases, enormous wealth. This is to me a strong and divine signal that all of these policy changes that the incoming presidential Administration is ushering in will leave no race, creed, color, or strata of American society untouched, and specifically, un-suffering, and it would seem that the Lord God Almighty Himself is going to see to it that all of us, to varying degrees, are going to be made to endure some unpleasant experience (if we haven't already) as a result of our collective decision to "sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind."

Resistance is futile - not to any particular leader (including our present one), but resistance to the will of the Lord is. Wealth (White) supremacy is coming to the end of itself ever-so-slowly, yet surely, and while Wealth supremacy is to be resisted, its end is certainly not. We haven't reached the end yet - there is still some road to travel, but the distance to be travelled to its end is close enough for the signage on the road to have hope and praise for its end in advance. A cursory examination of the current state of affairs would lead you to the opposite conclusion. Wealth is utterly ascendant. Oxfam International predicts that there will be 5 trillionaires in the next ten years. Racism and cruelty to all manner people of color, the poor, and the marginalized is downright fashionable now. How can it fail or fall?

The answer is that it will fail and fall under the weight of its own hubris and arrogance. This is how all the bad ideas of great nations fall, and how the nations fall with them. This is how Biblical Egypt fell, but it is important to understand how the whole thing got started. It started because the Jewish people asked to be temporarily freed to do the right thing - to go into the wilderness for three measly days to worship the Lord and then return to enslavement. They weren't even asking to end their enslavement - just like people asking for reasonable wages aren't asking to be millionaires, or Black and brown people seeking equal rights aren't asking to rule America - the Jews just wanted a little time to do right by the Lord. Pharaoh's response was to kick the Jews in the teeth; namely to make them work harder with fewer resources (making them make the same number of bricks while requiring them to rustle up their own straw.) But in America, in the next four years (and perhaps beyond), it will not just be Jews getting kicked in teeth, but it will be every manner of American - if not by the wind, by the fires. If not by the fires, by the water. If not by the water, by the ICE agent. If not by the ICE agent, by the racist. If not by the racist, by inflation. If not by inflation, by the Medicaid or Medicare or Social Security benefit cuts. And if not by them, then by the fascist snitch in the house or the cubicle next to yours at work.

But understand that the reason why we have to go through this is not just because there are people who want to put us through it, and who will delight in the doing. Oh no - we will go through this because this what we collectively chose in our arrogance, our racism, and our unneighborly lack of concern for those less well situated in this mean ol' world of ours. We have truly lost our love of truth, and the cornerstone of our Judeo-Christian foundation - our heart of mercy. This is not a loss that has been inflicted upon us by our leaders; rather, it is something that we have chosen to relinquish to the darkness because we didn't think it was anything worth holding on to. But we are going to pay for that - all of us in varying degrees - but pay we will.

And I am so terribly sorry that we have to pay, but I thank Almighty God that we will, because when we pay, we will regret. And when we regret, perhaps we will repent. And when we repent, the Lord may well forgive us, show us the mercy we relinquished to the darkness, and just in time, return that mercy to our hearts, and restore us to our proper place of leadership in the world. But if there is no regret or repentance, we will surely fail and we will surely fall, just like the Egyptians and the Romans and the Babylonians and the Nazis in their mercilessness, and every other foolish individual and nation that thought they could be blessed by God by taking and not giving, by lying, and by giving no heed to the dignity and welfare of their common neighbor. There is still time and hope for us to fall and then get up. But if we don't hurry up and fall and regret and repent, then America will surely fall - and it won't get up again.