What Has Happened to US?

What has happened to us?

Was it lurking just under the surface

all those years I thought

we were making progress?

 

I shouldn’t have expected much because

I knew all about original sin.

It was in my Reformed blood

by osmosis and conditioning.

 

I have to re-member that in spite of the doctrine, it

was a couple of really good Sunday school

teachers who exposed me to the real Jesus.

Will he now stand up?

 

Those (the reality of things going south

inevitably and the good news that Jesus

is still speaking even though he hasn’t

stood up, yet) things

 

carried me through the seventies after the

dashed dreams of the sixties and Phil Ochs

hung himself on a tree and so many dropped

drugs down their throats.

 

I held up Jesus or shall I say I sat on Jesus’

lap through it all, but still, still, still, I really,

really wish upon a star that we could

have made a difference.

 

And now I’m in my late sixties and while

I am appalled at the discourtesy, incivility,

damnable, downright me, me, meanness of

it all I’m sitting here, gotten up out of Jesus

 

lap watching a slimmed down Andrew

Zimmern really impressed how the affable, once

pudgy Jewish guy from New York made it

through drugs, homelessness only to pull it

 

all together, become a class act chef, move

to the upper Midwest, and then lose that weight

on a show where he eats everything in sight.

(Obviously, he’s not kosher,

 

but he is a stand-up kind of Jewish guy.)

He’s not explaining, bragging, hyping,

documenting the accomplishment, at least not

on-line, because I looked last night.

 

So now he’s a slimmed down version of the kid

every Jewish mother could and would love and brag

about: “That’s my son Andy slurping the pig’s balls

someplace in America for this season.”

 

Every Jewish boy is the Messiah in his mother’s eyes.

And I guess that means the Mormons are right; Jesus

did make it to America. He had a hard time in New York

but he’s happy in the upper Midwest.