God Will Save Us - Not

I have a neighbor up the street from me. He is a follower of Jehovah’s Witness. He goes about his life every day knowing that Jehovah is his caretaker. And he wants everyone else to assume this belief including me. He tries until I eventually insult him and tell him that he is full of shit and that there is no god - only political demons to fight against. But he has no interest in politics. He hardly understands that the nation is closing in on authoritarianism.

I have a longtime friend who is older now like me and she is also a god-fearing woman. In 2021, I had stood in line waiting repeatedly for the vaccine that was being distributed according to oldest first, which was appropriate since the oldest folks were being decimated from Covid-19, and I waited for a no-show at the end of each day since the vaccine had to be used after it was unfrozen. And finally during one bad weather day, a few no-shows later and I got my vaccine. The vaccine was I feel, a lifesaver for me. I have bronchitis. I have or had high blood pressure and I’m pre diabetic. Any of these might have caused me to lose my life resulting from the virus. But put all three together and I was a dead man walking.

But my friend Veronica told me the day I called that her sweet baby Jesus would save her if she caught the disease. Fortunately for her, Baby Jesus didn’t need to intervene. So I wrote her a song titled, “Vaccine for Veronica” and after I recorded the song, I sent it to her and she screamed at me. She really wasn’t my close friend. Her brother Benny was but he died in 2016. However I always got along with her. And by the way, Veronica is a dyed in the wool MAGA supporter. Her brother had warned me of this poor woman’s extreme far right beliefs a long time ago. As he said, “That’s Veronica.” She complains about everything; expensive food. Well, she eats all forms of steak and other red meats no wonder. And some of us realize that this food is not healthy to eat besides it being very expensive and results in unnecessary killing of beautiful animals. But Veronica complains and knows her baby Jesus and Donald Trump will save her.

I’ve heard that religious lie before. Believe me. I came from what is now called a blended family; mother was Italian Catholic and father came from orthodox Jewish background. He didn’t practice nor probably believed but mama did and they sent me to Catholic grade school. The Sisters of Mercy thought I was the biblical prophecy of Jewish conversion until I began talking (I was a little chatter box even then) and before long, the nuns realized that I was a messenger from hell. They did teach us well and they were devoted educators. They told us we were two grades ahead of the public schools but they were off by one or two grades. We were about 3 or 4 grades ahead of them. My seventh grade teacher Sister Anthony Mary had a thing for space rockets and made us copy off the black board the different kinds of rockets and the fuels that were used. I so admire them for their peculiarities and dedication to teaching us. They also admonished us to use reason and logic as our guide posts in life and I eventually reasoned that there was no god. The principal eventually expelled me 2 weeks before summer vacation in 1967 for refusing to cut my hair. It really wasn’t about the hair length. They had found my Achilles Heel and I wasn’t about to get a butch hair cut as I entered the mythical ”Summer of Love.”

Father Emerling demanded I get a cut similar like his butch-style. I had already gone to the barber twice getting it trimmed and the 2nd time I went I scrapped up my hair trimmings off the floor and put it in a paper bag as evidence since I knew he wouldn’t believe me. He didn’t. I stated to him no more hair cutting and he instructed me to return to my home room and collect my belongings and go home as I was being expelled. I still recall that long lonely walk home from school that day. The great unknown was now in front of me. But I had stood up to authority. I remain proud of myself for making this early decision. I’ve been standing up to authority all my life - when necessary.

Some things don’t change. Throughout my life I have always been certain that there is no god. Most if not all believers are lambs that need their shepherds to lead them through the thickets of life. I lead myself. I’m not a hardened partisan. I have conservative view points as well as liberal ones and at times I’m not even sure what liberal and conservative mean. I can easily find myself in argument with either side.

One thing I have evolved is that mankind most always builds to destroy. We built a very imperfect democracy in these Disunited States. It was predicated on freedom from payment of taxes not freedom of body and spirit. Many if not most of our Founders owned slaves. Thomas Jefferson, slave owner, molester of a slave, figured out how much profit was made at his nail factory and the expense of buying the metal to forge the nails, they time it took his enslaved to produce a daily quantity of the product line, how much food each slave consumed per day and the cost of maintenance of said slave. Yes he was a brilliant businessman and brilliant writer of our founding documents. Yes it was all founded on “No taxation without representation…” you heard the lines before.

At least the founding documents gave our nation the possibility to advance to a more perfect Union. In my opinion, our best leadership arrived as FDR led us out of the Great Depression and for several decades onwards, gave meaning to the proposition of an expanding and prosperous middle income population. But the pendulum has shifted and I know not if we will relearn the mistakes of the past Gilded Age and forge a more equitable society again.

I enjoy dabbling in stand-up comedy and one night at a Methodist Church open mic, I confidently strode to the mic (accompanied by the spirit of Mark Twain who once lived in my town of Hartford) and announced that god made a terrible mistake allowing the wrong primate tribe up the evolutionary trail. I explained that God (yes capitalized now), had designated the Bonobos to advance but Man saw what was going on and grabbed the tickets and ran like hell. The Bonobos, btw if you didn’t know, is an extremely small primate tribe only found in the wild in The Congo. They are a maternal-led group and when the males begin acting up, the females close ranks and deprive the males of sex and this calms them right down. (Maybe we could learn a little from our Bonobos cousins.) The Methodists didn’t approve of my humor that evening and when I later asked why, a woman screamed at me that, “God doesn’t make mistakes.” Now that was funny.

Veronica told me her son had found my song that I wrote to her through algorithms on YouTube and now she is happy a song has been written about her. I asked her to come to the nurses vigil at my state capital where organizers allowed me to perform a few songs and I dedicated “Vaccine for Veronica” to all the nurses in the audience who save our lives everyday. It was an extremely cold day but Veronica passed on coming out. The song was also dedicated to Alex Pretti and Renee Good who stood up to authority as I would have had I been there.

Here is the song “Vaccine for Veronica”