Wrath of God

Aside from being one of the most badass Magic cards for a 10 year old to use, the Wrath of God is a hard thing to come by these days. People can always make the argument that natural disasters are God flexing his little wrath filled fingertips, but that would make them supernatural disasters. I do, however, wonder if in 100 or 200 years the last two decades will appear to be a time of catastrophe. Living in the these times, it's very hard to see just how much shit is going on and it's definitely easier to forget things that happened less than a decade ago. I don't know about the rest of you guys, but 9/11 seems like it happened in another life. In ten years time, I'm sure we'll all have a very limited memory of the earthquake in Haiti. I'd be willing to bet that most people will remember seeing the "Text 90999 to donate $10 to help Haiti" during football games and almost every other important show this past Fall and Winter.

Being raised in the Catholic church and having attended parochial school through 8th grade, I am very familiar with the stories in the Bible. From what I can see, God would get much more involved with everything back in the Old Testament days. The big guy would manifest himself as a burning bush, make some tablets, create the arc of the covenant, the whole Sodom and Gomorrah debacle, and fuck up the world with the tower of Babel thing. Oh yeah, and flooding the world and killing all but a handful of people and a metric shit ton of animals. He was a busy bee. But what's he(He if you want to be biblical about it) up to these days? What is God responsible for since the death of the J-man? The Bubonic plague? Mass genocides? Who the hell knows. But one way or the other, the Wrath of God is not what it used to be.

One thing that really boggles my mind is the NASA program. I know there's a lot more going on than I can ever realize, but the space race was huge in the mid to late 20th century. Most of this is probably due to the competition betwixt the US of A and those darn Communists. As sad as it is, war drives things to move faster than it normally would. It creates a sense of urgency. Especially in the Cold War, prestige was possibly the largest weapon (aside from all those nuclear thingys.) It was a contest to which system of government was the best, and every little victory was important. The Miracle on Ice is another example of a point for the United States. But since space is no longer an object of competition, it no longer interests the general public. One would at least think we'd be able to put a man on Mars by now, looking at the exponential leaps that NASA used to take. But no. Oh well, better just give Pluto the big ugly axe so there's one less planet to explore. BOOM.

This is not meant to be a discussion of God, but an observation that nothing really earth shattering has happened for a while and we're about due. Even in music, the most recent thing to shake the music world has been the creation and popularization of Rap, and that started decades ago. Yes, the internet was a big deal, but it seems for the most part that there is more focus on making things smaller and faster (technologically speaking,) rather than create something new. I think everyone was really banking on the Y2K thing to shake things up. Maybe we're all sort of hoping that the Mayans were kind of right with their prediction that the world will end in 2012.

Present day existence is pretty boring, but maybe that's a good thing. However, I know I've said this before, but where the hell is my jet pack?