Prayer
Dear God:
I know I’m probably not the best person to come along with a prayer he’d like to have answered. I’m not a Christian, so Your Son Jesus isn’t going to intercede for me. I’m not even really a believer, and regularly deny Your existence, so I can understand why You’d be reluctant to even give me the time of day. So before I begin my prayer, I’d like You to consider me the messenger for what is surely a much larger group of people, including many believers. Please undertake my request for their benefit.
Lord, I’ve been watching what’s going on in Washington DC, and what our “leaders” have done to the economy. Surely you don’t need me to quote you chapter and verse: suffice it to say that since the 1990s, our representatives lost sight of their constituents, and began representing what can only be called Wall Street Greedheads. They tore down the very regulations meant to prevent Great Depression-style disasters, rewarding incompetence and nincompoopery. At every single juncture, democrats and republicans have stood up for the wealthy and the powerful at the expense of the poor and the weak.
Lord, it’s no secret that one of the reasons this happens is that our political class is typically far wealthier than their constituents, so I am asking you to level the playing field. Lord, please wipe out the financial wealth and social connections of every single Congressperson and Senator. make it so Arlen Specter can’t afford to put gas in his car. Make it so that Bob Casey can’t afford to heat his house. Make it impossible for anyone in the senate or congress to be able to send their kids to college. Make it so they can’t even afford the no-name brand at the grocery and have to apply for welfare payments. Let them be denied for loans, let them find their wives are pregnant with children they can’t afford to raise, and let them get horrible diseases they can’t afford to cure, and let them be declined by their insurer for “pre-existing conditions”.
Lord, let those politicians know what it’s like to walk a mile (perhaps 100 miles, maybe even 10,000 miles or more) in the shoes of those who have been punished by their policies of the past 15 years or so. Lord, let Tom Carper, who sponsored the bankruptcy bill, wind up living in a cardboard box in downtown Wilmington this winter with Joe Biden living next door in a makeshift lean-to. Use your omnipotent power to ensure that Phil Gramm, James Inhofe, the Clintons, and the entire Bush family go through a financial meltdown that leaves them picking out of grocery store dumpsters for discarded food.
Lord, I have no hope that these villains will ever learn anything, so please, if it behoove you to do so: put them in the same shoes as the rest of the country. And if you accomplish this significant feat during my lifetime, I will begin attending the church of my choice. It’ll probably be the Unitarian Universalists, and i hope you don’t mind that.
Hope you can help out, amen and all that stuff.
Brendan Skwire
November 24th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
Brendan, one of your best. Thanks.
November 24th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
[...] the hall and to the Left, at Brendan’s. [...]
November 24th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
Amen.