What Fools These Mortals Be!

As a small child unaware of the Shakespearean source of this title, I knew it as the intriguing caption of the comic section of my family’s Sunday newspaper. What a salient message it carries!

A fabric of other salient messages: "Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom". "Love your neighbor as yourself". "Whatever you did to the least of these, you did to Me". "Love does no evil to the neighbor, hence love is the fulfillment of the law".

Elements of nature most essential to our enjoyment of life, indeed, even to life itself, bear immence powers - beneficial or destructive - of which we need, ever, be mindful. Both recreational surfer and yachtsman need be aware of boundaries of the sea’s delightful turbulence beyond which its friendliness becomes its threat. Cliff-climbers must ever be mindful that exhilarating vistas below double as life-crushing terminators at incautious moves. The ever-needed air sustaining us, delightfully wafting our cheeks on a Spring evening, can bear cyclonic forces to whose signs we need be alert. None of these inanimate elements is recriminatory - just powerfully demanding of our educated good sense.

With that sense we human beings learn the signs - the vernacular might say the "ground rules" - that allow us to enjoy the benefits and prepare us to avoid the dangers of, these, and of other, powerful forces of life’s enjoyment and of life’s dangers. We learn and we accommodate - or we die!

The most powerful force in our lives is He who - out of nothing - created all these other forces, as well as all material things in this world, including us rational beings. He gave us rules by which to live and thrive happily, the most fundamental of which entail respecting - loving - our Creator and all of His creatures. Just as our alertness in learning the various "ground rules" that facilitate our enjoyment of manifold goods of life while avoiding consequences of our missuse of these same goods, we need to be all the more alert to learning and practicing the conduct of our affairs that fits, properly and smoothly the inter-functioning of all the diverse elements of this complex creation.

On the seventh day He declared all His creation "good" and He rested. That isn’t hard for us to understand. When we "make" things we consider them worthy of respect according to their particular purpose and physical makeup, be it a snowball we intend to throw, or a symphony or portrait we wish to be enjoyed by others.

Now, therein lies the first, knowable (commonsensical) facet of our understanding how this complex creation of God is intended to function well, to wit: Each element of it must be afforded by its rational elements (us), the respect the Creator intends for that particular element and its interface with the rest of creation. We need to respect, in their own dignity, all the elements of our environment, for they are all God-made. But more specifically, we are COMMANDED to "love our neighbor as ourself".

All human beings - to the extent we can affect any of them for the good or for the ill - are our neighbors. All bear the dignity of having been created by God. We are commanded to love them.

All human beings in the womb - even at their tinyest - are our neighbors. It is a dreadful peculiarity of our times that our basic law, the Constitution of the United States, has been construed, peculiarly, by our country’s highest legal authority to allow the arbitrary destruction of any of these innocent, helpless neighbors. Our Creator says "NO!"; our Supreme Court say "Yes" and our politicians - fully acting out typical politicians’ "profiles in the lack of courage" - use a deliberately confused language of ambiguity and half-truths to make what is bad appear to have good intentions so that a confused voting public will maintain them in office. And they succeed in winning their jobs by the thinnest of electoral margins. "Whatever you did to the least of these, you did to Me"

"What fools these mortals be" whose voting actions and inactions make possible the carnage of their innocent neighbors, living yet unborn. A very small portion (let’s call them "Group A") of the American electorate is comprised of abortion-supporting ideologues. A much larger contingency of voters (how about: "Group B") vote for abortion-supporting politicians - many such votes cast for reasons other than the politicians’ abortion-supporting stands. Fully 50% of all citizens franchised to vote ("Group C") stay at home, election day after election day, not willing even to "lift a finger" to protect millions of their neighbors from carnage!.

So God (Who is a very good Record Keeper, as well as Gatekeeper of the Narrow Gate to Eternity) says "Whatever you did to the least of these, you did to Me", yet American citizens in Groups A, B and C, treat His Great Commandment "Love your neighbor as yourself" so cavalierly as to permit the arbitrary killing each day of every year a number of unborn human beings that exceeds the 3,000 human beings killed by terrorists 9-11-2001!

How foolishly inconsistent to learn to accommodate the complex, lethal consequences of created forces (eg, wind sea and gravity) yet to ignore the simple lesson teaching the "beginning of wisdom": Fear of the Lord. Yet, unlike the fickle, natural forces of nature which are without either justice or mercy, our Creator is ever willing to temper the justice to which our individual actions have brought upon ourselves to the extent that we will humbly admit to past errors and resolve to deliberately avoid repeating them. But we’d better hurry: there’s an election coming up soon.

Creating a perceptible groundswell in favor of our unborn neighbors will - even before the casting of ballots - be sensed by alert politicians, far and near, as the "handwriting on the wall" that sounds the death knoll for the culture of death. Perhaps that result will so please God as to bring His mercy to bear on the just desserts of Groups A, B and C.