Theodicy for Dummies

I honestly find it hard to believe it's only been a week since I posted anything here. So much has happened in the interim, including one event that has acted like such a black hole, I'm certain I'm suffering from some form of emotional time dilation.

I don't have any thoughts and prayers to convey, to the victims or their families or anyone else affected. My heart is broken for them of of course, but I feel like those have been covered by enough other people; they don't need me pretending like I'm suddenly cool with the idea of a deity who is a) all good, b) omnipotent and c) seems distressingly chill with horrors like this happening on the regular. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the nature of any god you or anyone else prays to. Maybe it's just that I'm projecting that there should be an Old Testament-y activist god moving pieces around on the Great Cosmic Chessboard, even if every time he did it was either inscrutable (burning bush? pillar of salt? what even with that?) or just plain old dickish. Maybe god isn't so interventionist, like Clinton in the 1990s, but more of the retribution-smitey type, like George W. Bush. But if you look at all the suffering in Orlando, it sure seems like the smiting of the perpetrator was pretty minimal. He only got killed, and even his dad seemed pretty OK with it. Can't say the same for the families of his victims.

Maybe those are points in god's favor. Any linkage to George W. Bush is only going to be a drag on your favorables in the long run.

If anything positive came out of it (the TL;DR version: nothing did), maybe it was that I really got to understand mansplaining for the first time as, over and over again on facebook, I've had family members and strangers post impassioned* arguments about how those of us who aren't fortunate enough to experience boners produced only by a whiff of gun oil** are wrong, sure, but that's only because we haven't really thought about what the Constitution is or read enough nonsensical thought-vomit in paragraph form that includes the words "James Madison" and "sovereignty" over and over again, and both usually incorrectly.

It's tough to sit through a lecture on logic from gun folks. People whose worst fear is that the government will try to come and take their guns are actively supporting a state of affairs where it becomes more and more likely that that will be the only option left. If I'd ever given the NRA one single dollar, I'd be incensed at the suicide course they cling to so bitterly, tolerating no compromise, never entertaining even of an idea of returning to a more peaceful and idyllic status quo (that's what conservatives were super in to, I thought?). It's a murder-suicide pact demanding full, blind commitment to a cause that they portray as inalienable and timeless but really only dates back to the expiration of the federal assault weapons ban in 2004. It would be tragic if I wasn't half-sure that the government seizure program they keep warning about isn't their preferred outcome.

I'm not sure about correlations here, but at the same time we've seen an aggressive slate of anti-abortion legislation at the state level there's also been both a general rollback in gun ownership restriction and a sharp increase in purchases of guns and ammunition since Barack Obama took office. Conservatives have decided that these are the hills they're going to die on (but only after they're all the way born, even if they're the product of incest or rape or a danger to the life of the mother) and, overall, they're winning. Getting an abortion is increasingly really, really hard while buying a military-rated weapon of mass destruction is soul-crushingly simple. Add to that the spiraling epidemic of global and local income inequality and, if you're a socially aware, liberal-minded, non-sociopath, you can feel a bit of the old Black Dog edging it's nose into your lap, plus maybe then a paw, tensing to spring up for a long, sleepy snuggle.

These are the Obama years. Aren't they supposed to be the progressive's future Good Old Days? Well, yeah, they probably are. We didn't get stuck with John "Stop The Campaign!" McCain blundering us through the Great Recession into insolvency just in time to get pillow-faced in his sleep by Todd Palin so Sarah could be queen-president of Sovereign Alaska or some shit. Also there's a lot more health care, even in some of the really poor places run into the ground by the Jesus people. And Osama bin Laden died. And the Iraq thing stopped (mostly).

So OK, maybe Obama's job has been to correct a lot of stuff that was fucked up when he showed up on Day 1. But this is also a country now where an attack on LGBT Americans is met with a massive outpouring of grief, shock and sadness, without sniggering or tsk-tsking. Or at least those who aren't on board with the overwhelming majority of the genuinely compassionate must brace themselves for a stern, prolonged and aggressively direct social rebuke. We can think of where we were during the Bush Jr. years, with the vilification and division around an intractable and seemingly religiously untouchable problem like gay rights, and see where we are now...

This gun problem is something that will change too. We never had a black president before, until we did. We never had a lady president before, until... well, pretty soon. Gay marriage was illegal, until it wasn't. Hope is more a choice than anything else. The results of the most practical assessments are usually cold, hard things when examined individually. But if you pull back far enough, you can see the arc of history is broad, long and multicolored. That's right, it's like a goddamned rainbow.

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*that's me trying to find something nice to say. All the other things I thought of were compound hyphenate adjectives starting with "fuck-".

**I mean the oil used to maintain gun parts, not the brand name of lube targeted at dudes. Although I'm thinking maybe this is a distinction without a difference.