GOD'S NOT YOUR DAMNED COPILOT, FOOL, AND OTHER DICEY ASSUMPTIONS

I tend to give cars with I'm-more-religious-than-you bumper stickers a little more space than regular cars. I figure that people who rely on divine intervention to get where they're going aren't as alert as other drivers. Which other drivers? You know, regular people who realize it's their responsibility to get themselves and their passengers from Point A to Point B in one piece. Regular drivers figure God might be too distracted answering the incessant prayers from the religious bumper sticker crowd to guide each and every one of us safely to the supermarket and the dry cleaners and back home again. Maybe the reason so few prayers get answered is the sheer volume of such supplications.

Now, according to believers, God is the entity who created the entire universe, and the Hubbel telescope tells us he's not done yet. There's stars being born at an incredible rate out there in space, forming new galaxies as we speak, so apparently the universe in still a work in progress. And believers also feel that we are made in God's image. Okay then, aren't we for the most part the type of beings who prioritize? We don't attach the same importance to spilt milk, for example, as we do to broken legs. Now imagine 6 billion people complaining to you about spilt milk and maybe only fifty thousand about broken legs. Don't you think the help-me-I've-got-a-broken-leg requests would get a little more attention from us than the milk spills? You've got to figure that God as we imagine him has an awful lot on his plate requiring his attention other than your questionable driving skills. So, just in case God's in the middle of a particularly tricky cosmic building project, perhaps it's best to keep your eyes on the road and use the skill he built into you.

We assume too much, we humans do. Being at the top of the food chain will do that to a species, make us think we're in control of things. Then tsunamis and earthquakes happen and all the kings horses and al the kings men can't do jack about it. And those are just the natural disasters. What about the ones we create? Has anybody ever seen the town of Nyack, New York? Sorry if that's your hometown, but you should be even sorrier. And that's not the only eyesore by far. But that's only ugly, a spilt milk complaint, really. How about all the poisoning we've done to our sky and land? That's broken leg material well worth getting our attention but still we burn the remains of our planetary predecessors to get energy. We assumed this resource would last forever even though unlike wood, our previous go-to energy source, we can't grow any replacements.

And it's not like we have had no warning that the oil is disappearing. The old figures stating that it would last for hundreds of years to come forgot to factor in all the former have-nots of the world finally getting to have stuff, and thus ratcheting up the demand for oil and rendering those predictions even sillier than they were. Did the Western nations think they'd keep all the cookies in the jar forever? Apparently so. But then they decided that western workers were too well paid and too well fed to manufacture goods anymore so poor nations were enlisted to make cheap goods. The only problem is that the ingrates in the poor nations wanted electric lights and running water once they had a taste of modern amenities so now the demand for oil is through the roof.

And the roof, by the way, is leaking, that roof being our sky, the atmosphere that we breathe, and a thing more important to our lives than SUV's or flat screen TV's. And so we cry that the planet is in danger when nothing could be further from the truth. It is us who are in danger, not the planet. The Earth can get along just fine without oxygen or an ozone layer. We sure as hell can't. So we panic about losing our ability to survive and governments respond by convening committees, the places where ideas go to die. Committees are relatively cheap and and make us feel the problems are being solved. Meanwhile, our own government, for one, spends more in a single day on warfare than it does on research for the entire year on how come up with an alternative to burning and poisoning ourselves out of existence. Doesn't look like such a rosy future unless we get serious about alternate energy sources. Maybe we'll have a lot to ponder in the eons where we rot away into fuel for the next species to inherit the Earth.