let’s get dark for a bit, shall we?

I wrote this back in mid-September. I don’t know why I didn’t publish it then.

It might be a poem. I don’t know that either.

____________________________________________________________________

Had a convo with Josh last week that altered my opinion of the USA.

And by altered, I mean worsened.

So.

If, like me, you grew up immersed in conservative, evangelical, historically-Protestant Christianity,

you’re familiar with the “Old Testament” scriptures (in Book of Leviticus [in Torah/Pentateuch], Book of Jeremiah [in Tanakh], Book of Kings [Tanakh; 1. & 2. Kings in Christian Bible]) referencing “Moloch.”

In context, the ancient Israelites are being warned to stop sacrificing children either to a god named “Moloch” or in a ritual called “Moloch.”

At any rate, these scriptures tell a story of an ancient people

named “the People of ‘He Who Contends with God'”

a people who had committed themselves to a certain way of being in the universe–

but instead, in the story, murdered their own children in the hopes of gaining a benefit.

Were they appeasing a god? Trying to protect themselves from the god’s wrath?
Did they believe that they were releasing a transformative energy?
Was the wheat just not growing well enough?
Were the thunder and lightning of storms just too damn confusing and scary?

Who knows.

But in this story

innocent children died
in pain, in fear, in blood

so that the adults, who stayed alive,
could gain something.

Dead children. Murdered children.
For the preservation of a culture.
For the preservation of a nation.
For the preservation of a way of life.

And now, approximately 4,000 years later,

the United States of America,
a nation accustomed to a certain way of life,
faces a crisis

of dead children.
Murdered children.

Today, in the great and glorious nation named “United States of America”
(and, interestingly enough, “America” is a word descended of words meaning “struggle” and “king”),

the ritual of Moloch is thriving.

Since Columbine 1999, there have been at least

400 school shootings
390,000 children exposed to the violence of these shootings
200 deaths of children in these shootings.

In the USA, enacting the ritual of Moloch
means allowing these school shootings to continue.

In the USA, the dead children of school shootings
the murdered children
are the live sacrifice
slaughtered upon the holy altar of our school grounds.

We feed our children to the god whom we name “Freedom”
so that the god will continue blessing us

with our Second Amendment rights.

The ritual of Moloch is the religion of the United States of America.

The US-American Church of Moloch has its temples:

the National Rifle Association
the National Shooting Sports Foundation
the National Association for Gun Rights

the White House.

The US-American Church of Moloch also has its priests:

Charlton Heston
Lauren Boebert
Kyle Rittenhouse

–and its high priests:

Dudley Brown
Bill Bachenberg
Charlie Kirk
Donald Trump.

The US-American Church of Moloch is thriving.
A religion of greed, violence, fear, blood, death. All glorified:

every knee shall bow.

Every priest and high priest of the US-American Church of Moloch is celebrated and valorized,

especially the high priest who died last week by the same violence he had preached
and was preaching as he died.

His children were there, watching,
two more innocents tossed onto the altar,
their present and future pain an ongoing sacrifice

to appease that god named “Freedom”
so we can have our Second Amendment rights
so we don’t have to give up that which we truly treasure:

the satisfying snap of the clip
the hiss of metal sliding against metal as the bullet chambers
the click of the trigger
the force of the explosion we imagine we’re controlling
the power of knowing that in this moment, we control life and death

the illusion that in this moment
we have won the striving against the endless Abyss we all know is there.

Our treasure: the pretense that we’ve successfully held back the night
and put off the day of wrath.

The children of the United States of America are the accepted Moloch sacrifice
so that our god Freedom will make us feel (better).

May the universe have mercy on us.