BY REV BILLY | The MAGA movement (Make America Great Again) is virtual reality, a completion of the project of Consumerism. It is a parallel world that whips people into a frenzy of prideful fear, but is sold to us like a product.
The MEGA movement (Make Earth Great Again) is for those who see that the Earth’s tumultuous storms and floods are not a mass extinction but an evolution. The “extinction” is named by humans who fear that they will be extinguished, just as MAGA people feel that they will not survive the flood of non-white strangers from beyond their wall.
The Sixth Extinction is really the Sixth Evolution, in which life changes so that it will survive. The Earth is a self-regulating ecosystem. Something in the biosphere and the living geology continually creates life. Life wants to make life. And life is the creator of love, dreams and compassion.
Young Americans reject Trumpism and its evil placenta of virtual reality.
This Memorial Day weekend found Donald Trump campaigning on while supercell tornadoes were killing dozens of people across Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Kentucky. Towns are being ripped into the air. Hundreds in Brazil’s Rio Grande do Sul are drowned by floods. Six hundred thousand are displaced. Sewage-tainted water is spreading leptospirosis. In Mexico overheated howler monkeys are falling dead from the trees.
This plays into MAGA’s fear of difference, of the Other. Bad weather is carried like a disease by bad people. And when a natural disaster hits Trumpers? The MAGA people plant the Stars and Stripes in mountains of refuse, as if American greatness will triumph over the 200 mph winds.
The denial of what is really happening, in the face of the wind and fire and flood of the present apocalypse, is a mass suicide mistaken for the glory of yesteryear. But this greatness is a virtual-reality bubble of the U.S.A., layered over the dead remains of the conquering nation back in the day.
You can feel that evil placenta of virtual reality closing over us now. Independent thought, original music — anything that is perceived as strange — is called Not American. But this isn’t working. People have a way of dissolving the fear. Young Americans reject Trumpism and take much more responsibility for the drama of the Earth.
In the MEGA movement our institutions will love the Earth more than the profits of their quarterly reports. Cities and neighborhoods will officially love the Earth without embarrassment. We will live with a vision of changing as the Earth changes… . And we have a compassionate view of the fire and flood. Tragic bad weather isn’t evil. It is understandable.
Our opportunity is to join in this scary evolution by loving the Earth, and by loving the people who have always loved the Earth. We will have the Vision of being a part of the Earth’s greatness, although it is a future that the Earth will make, not a remake of the old human movie.
Living that way now with the miles of concrete and tons of airborne toxicity is unimaginable to us. But the MEGA movement — the return of the Earth’s greatness — will not be limited by what we can imagine. The Earth’s vision of a future IS strange. And can we be strange enough to change enough? We will have to love the Earth again to survive.
Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir return! After a month on the road, Earthchxrch resurrects Sun., June 2, at 5 p.m., at 36 Loisaida Ave (Avenue C), at the corner of Third Street, East Village. Performances are directed by Savitri D.
Barack and Michelle better move their oceanfront mansions from Maui and Martha’s Vineyard.