02-01-2005, 05:57 PM
Quote:There Is No Tomorrow
By Bill Moyers
The Star Tribune
Sunday 30 January 2005
One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional
is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of
power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time in our history,
ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.
Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold
stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted
as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always
bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians
alike, oblivious to the facts.
Remember James Watt, President Ronald Reagan's first secretary of the
interior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engaging Grist,
reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting
natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus
Christ. In public testimony he said, "after the last tree is felled, Christ will
come back."
Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn't know what he was talking
about. But James Watt was serious. So were his compatriots out across the
country. They are the people who believe the Bible is literally true - one-third
of the American electorate, if a recent Gallup poll is accurate. In this past
election several million good and decent citizens went to the polls believing in
the rapture index.
That's right - the rapture index. Google it and you will find that the
best-selling books in America today are the 12 volumes of the "Left Behind"
series written by the Christian fundamentalist and religious-right warrior
Timothy LaHaye. These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology
concocted in the 19th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took
disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative that has
captivated the imagination of millions of Americans.
Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer George Monbiot
recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted to him for adding to
my own understanding): Once Israel has occupied the rest of its "biblical
lands," legions of the antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown in
the valley of Armageddon.
As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return
for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and
transported to Heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will
watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores,
locusts and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow.
I'm not making this up. Like Monbiot, I've read the literature. I've reported
on these people, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are
sincere, serious and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring the
rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That's why they have declared
solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support
with money and volunteers. It's why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm-up
act, predicted in the Book of Revelations where four angels "which are bound in
the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of man." A war
with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed - an
essential conflagration on the road to redemption. The last time I Googled it,
the rapture index stood at 144 - just one point below the critical threshold
when the whole thing will blow, the son of God will return, the righteous will
enter Heaven and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire.
So what does this mean for public policy and the environment? Go to Grist to
read a remarkable work of reporting by the journalist Glenn Scherer - "The Road
to Environmental Apocalypse." Read it and you will see how millions of Christian
fundamentalists may believe that environmental destruction is not only to be
disregarded but actually welcomed - even hastened - as a sign of the coming
apocalypse.
As Grist makes clear, we're not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers
who hold or are beholden to these beliefs. Nearly half the U.S. Congress before
the recent election - 231 legislators in total and more since the election - are
backed by the religious right.
Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th Congress earned 80 to 100
percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian right
advocacy groups. They include Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Assistant
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Conference Chair Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania,
Policy Chair Jon Kyl of Arizona, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Whip
Roy Blunt. The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian coalition
was Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, who recently quoted from the biblical book of
Amos on the Senate floor: "The days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will
send a famine in the land." He seemed to be relishing the thought.
And why not? There's a constituency for it. A 2002 Time-CNN poll found that 59
percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of
Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted
the 9/11 attacks. Drive across the country with your radio tuned to the more
than 1,600 Christian radio stations, or in the motel turn on some of the 250
Christian TV stations, and you can hear some of this end-time gospel. And you
will come to understand why people under the spell of such potent prophecies
cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, "to worry about the environment. Why care
about the earth, when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by
ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why care
about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the rapture?
And why care about converting from oil to solar when the same God who performed
the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light
crude with a word?"
Because these people believe that until Christ does return, the Lord will
provide. One of their texts is a high school history book, "America's
Providential History." You'll find there these words: "The secular or socialist
has a limited-resource mentality and views the world as a pie .... that needs to
be cut up so everyone can get a piece." However, "[t]he Christian knows that the
potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in
God's earth ... while many secularists view the world as overpopulated,
Christians know that God has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of
resources to accommodate all of the people."
No wonder Karl Rove goes around the White House whistling that militant hymn,
"Onward Christian Soldiers." He turned out millions of the foot soldiers on Nov.
2, including many who have made the apocalypse a powerful driving force in
modern American politics.
It is hard for the journalist to report a story like this with any
credibility. So let me put it on a personal level. I myself don't know how to be
in this world without expecting a confident future and getting up every morning
to do what I can to bring it about. So I have always been an optimist. Now,
however, I think of my friend on Wall Street whom I once
asked: "What do you think of the market?"I'm optimistic," he answered. "Then why
do you look so worried?" And he answered: "Because I am not sure my optimism is
justified."
I'm not, either. Once upon a time I agreed with Eric Chivian and the Center
for Health and the Global Environment that people will protect the natural
environment when they realize its importance to their health and to the health
and lives of their children. Now I am not so sure. It's not that I don't want to
believe that - it's just that I read the news and connect the dots.
I read that the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has
declared the election a mandate for President Bush on the environment. This for
an administration:
That wants to rewrite the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered
Species Act protecting rare plant and animal species and their habitats, as well
as the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires the government to judge
beforehand whether actions might damage natural resources.
That wants to relax pollution limits for ozone; eliminate vehicle tailpipe
inspections, and ease pollution standards for cars, sport-utility vehicles and
diesel-powered big trucks and heavy equipment.
That wants a new international audit law to allow corporations to keep certain
information about environmental problems secret from the public.
That wants to drop all its new-source review suits against polluting, coal-fired
power plants and weaken consent decrees reached earlier with coal companies.
That wants to open the Arctic [National] Wildlife Refuge to drilling and
increase drilling in Padre Island National Seashore, the longest stretch of
undeveloped barrier island in the world and the last great coastal wild land in
America.
I read the news just this week and learned how the Environmental Protection
Agency had planned to spend $9 million - $2 million of it from the
administration's friends at the American Chemistry Council - to pay poor
families to continue to use pesticides in their homes. These pesticides have
been linked to neurological damage in children, but instead of ordering an end
to their use, the government and the industry were going to offer the families
$970 each, as well as a camcorder and children's clothing, to serve as guinea
pigs for the study.
I read all this in the news.
I read the news just last night and learned that the administration's friends
at the International Policy Network, which is supported by Exxon Mobil and
others of like mind, have issued a new report that climate change is "a myth,
sea levels are not rising" [and] scientists who believe catastrophe is possible
are "an embarrassment."
I not only read the news but the fine print of the recent appropriations bill
passed by Congress, with the obscure (and obscene) riders attached to
it: a clause removing all endangered species protections from pesticides;
language prohibiting judicial review for a forest in Oregon; a waiver of
environmental review for grazing permits on public lands; a rider pressed by
developers to weaken protection for crucial habitats in California.
I read all this and look up at the pictures on my desk, next to the computer -
pictures of my grandchildren. I see the future looking back at me from those
photographs and I say, "Father, forgive us, for we know not what we do." And
then I am stopped short by the thought: "That's not right. We do know what we
are doing. We are stealing their future. Betraying their trust. Despoiling their
world."
And I ask myself: Why? Is it because we don't care? Because we are greedy?
Because we have lost our capacity for outrage, our ability to sustain
indignation at injustice?
What has happened to our moral imagination?
On the heath Lear asks Gloucester: "How do you see the world?" And Gloucester,
who is blind, answers: "I see it feelingly.'"
I see it feelingly.
The news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as a journalist
I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that
sets us free - not only to feel but to fight for the future we want. And the
will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer
to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk. What we
need is what the ancient Israelites called hochma - the science of the heart ...
the capacity to see, to feel and then to act as if the future depended on you.
Believe me, it does.