The Maker of Beauty and His World's Atrocities

FROM THE ARCHIVES (Daily Nebraskan columns)

The Maker of Beauty and His World's Atrocities

Jeremy Patrick (jhaeman@hotmail.com)

October 09, 2000

"Look at that, Jeremy!" my Mom says while pointing outside the car window. "How can there not be a God?"
This innocuous comment is one in a long line of continuing theological remarks between my parents and I. These debates are actually kind of nice - we talk more now that I've become atheist than we ever did before. And I must admit, the sky is beautiful.
As we drive along the Colorado interstate, the sun is just beginning to set behind the mountains. The sky is purple, orange, red, other colors I cannot even describe - the kind of view at the end of an epic novel as the hero walks away to seek his destiny. The kind of sunset when the beautiful woman and handsome man embrace at the end of a romantic movie.
But I think back (why, I'm not sure) to one day during summer classes at Chadron. The campus was mostly deserted, and I had lunch alone every day, reading the newspaper and eating a mini cheese pizza - the only vegetarian meal available.
I didn't read much of the international news because I knew the same headlines would be running five years from then: Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, conflict in Northern Ireland, sanctions in Iraq.
But my eye caught a little article (a blurb, really) about a civil war in Rwanda. It stated that thousands and thousands of members of one group were "hacked and bludgeoned to death" with machetes and clubs by members of another group. Hacked and bludgeoned!
Summarized in the space of a paragraph and bare for the world to see. I knew no one would care; more people would read and think deeply about their daily horoscope than this. But it was my wake-up call, my little existential introduction into how absurd our world really is. I was stunned. I am still stunned.
I remember, also, news reports of the rape camps in Bosnia. Girls as young as 12 violated by an entire platoon of soldiers. Atrocities committed by both sides. Even if one army was better than the other, neither could be considered justified by any stretch of the imagination.
My body is cruising along in my parents' new Dodge Intrepid, but my mind is seeing migrant farm workers in California, killing themselves for $5.15 an hour. Queer people walking nervously with their partners because they don't want to become the next Matthew Sheppard. A 1,000 times a 1,000 young men rotting away in 10-by-12 concrete cages for having "committed" nonviolent drug offenses.
If I am bitter, it is not from personal experience. I do not know what these people really feel like. The problem is I can guess. I guess they're not as happy as my mother is right now, secure in her white, middle-class, $60,000 a year job with a husband, three kids and one black Labrador retriever.
I guess they would trade the beautiful sunsets for relief from their pain.
I know any God responsible for sunsets, rainbows and warm puppy dogs is also responsible for holocausts, poverty, prejudice and the myriad other cruel ways one portion of humanity has subjugated another portion.
If God exists, he is perfectly beneficent and malevolent at the same time. The ultimate incarnation of schizophrenia.
"Whatever," I say as I shrug my shoulders and flash a not-quite-real smile. I let her have this moment - there will be others, and perhaps then I'll tell her why I don't enjoy the sunset as much as she does.
(c) 2000 Jeremy Patrick