GC Myers- Blaze, 2014
When men sow the wind it is rational to expect that they will reap the whirlwind.
–Frederick Douglass
Amplified consequence.
In his 1892 essay, Lynch Law in the South, Frederick Douglass used the proverb from biblical book Hosea, to illustrate how man often sets things in motion that have results that extend far beyond– and often in stark opposition to– their intended goals. Douglass wrote that the deadly violence being shown against the black citizens of the south at that time would eventually come back to haunt those that perpetrated the deed or stood idly by, complicit in their silence.
The biblical proverb in Hosea was about how the the citizens of Israel of that time (ca 725 BC, I believe) took to idolatry, the worship of false idols, and how their actions brought down upon them the wrath of God. In that book the author uses the concept of farming to make his point, that a a single seed of grain sowed by a farmer returns to him many times over.
An amplified consequence.
Of course, the farmer can usually tell what the result of his sowing will be. Planting X amount of seed will allow him to reap Y amount of grain at harvest under normal circumstances. Predictable.
But that same degree of predictability doesn’t apply to all other actions man sometimes sets in motion. While we might initially think we control the outcome, we sometimes put actions into motion — sow our seed– that we cannot control, that return to us with such amplification and intensity that we are overcome and sometimes decimated by the result.
One small, seemingly insignificant action, such as not paying attention to a rising dangerous wind, can sometimes turn into a maelstrom of destruction that we never saw coming.
The entry above ran several years back. I wanted to say something today about yesterday’s verdict in the civil case against the former president*** and today’s coming indictment of a sitting congressman along with what no doubt will be many more serious legal actions in the coming months. I believe that anybody that watched closely over the past six or seven years has been anticipating this action for much of that time.
It was an act of faith, this believing that dire consequences would finally come to those characters who twisted and broke laws for their own gains, who lied without end in betraying the public trust. Thise who gained power not to serve the people but to serve themselves.
Justice, however, has been slow in coming and the faith in karmic justice of many has been strained. One was left to wonder why anyone would follow the rule of law when those entrusted to serve us were exempt from doing so. It felt as though unless justice was meted out to those usurpers of the power of our government, everything would come apart.
The center could not hold.
After all, when one has lost all beliefs and trust, what holds their world together?
Maybe yesterday was hopefully a beginning to a coming whirlwind. A righteous and justified whirlwind that will cleanse the landscape and restore the faith of many in that which is right.
Using lines from a couple of other earlier blogposts, Robert Louis Stevenson claimed: Everybody, sooner or later, sits down to a banquet of consequences.
Or to put it in even more direct terms, from the song from Rival Sons:
When it comes back around you’re gonna get what’s coming.
You sit on your fence and you scream about justice.
Between the have and have-not’s only one feels the difference.
And when it comes back around you’re gonna get what’s coming.
When it comes back around you’re gonna get what’s coming.
I’ve played this song a couple of times in the past several years in the anticipation of a coming whirlwind of justice. Let’s hope yesterday’s first breeze foretells of a mighty storm.
Redtree Times 