thunder and lightning

“O the depravity of my people!  They are without order and without mercy…. And they have become strong in their perversion; and they are alike brutal, sparing none, neither old nor young; and they delight in everything save that which is good… they are without principle, and past feeling… I cannot recommend them unto God lest he should smite me” (Moroni 9.18-21).

Immediately after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, I wrote that the election of America’s sociopathic Caligula was a revelation—several of them, actually. These revelations have guided much of what I have said publicly and written on this site over the course of the past three and a half years.
 
One of the revelations I mentioned then, and have repeated many times since, is that the days of the “still small voice” are past. Gone. Over. Kaput. We have entered a new era: an era of thunder and lightning.
 
Whatever they may be in their individual and private lives, in their public lives a disturbing number of Americans have become, as Mormon lamented of his people, depraved, without order, perverted, unprincipled, and an offense in the sight of God. They have shown themselves to be “past feeling.” They are no longer capable of hearing any “still small voice.” If they are to hear, they must be spoken to with “thunder.” The day of parables, carefully measured responses, subtlety, even temperance is over.
 
If Americans now begin to show early signs of turning on the American Caligula, it is only because they have heard the clap of lightning and the roar of thunder in an unmanaged Coronavirus pandemic. If they finish their turn and reject him, I will have been proved correct. If even the lightning and thunder doesn’t do the trick, we are lost.
 
Too many still do not seem to understand the new day we are in. Too many religious leaders, too many politicians, too many media personalities continue to hold to their old, measured, “objective,” and temperate ways. As a preacher, I once lived there too. Hell, I lived there for 40 years. Now, I am ashamed of my cowardly ways. Priestcraft, scripture calls it. It is safe. But it does not save. Not in this environment. But I have repented. So must all if they wish to be heard, and save a nation in the throes of early collapse.
 
Still, some remain perplexed when I level such complaints against “opinion makers.” “But,” they complain, “people are speaking out against tRUMP, his corruption, his lying, his abuse of power, his dismantling of America Democracy, his undermining of social norms.”
 
Yes, some are. But, let’s have a look at one example. I apologize ahead of time to this particular reporter. I don’t mean to pick on her. I could have chosen any one of thousands of pieces.
 
“The Trump administration is rebuffing House Democrats' effort to hear testimony from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield on safely reopening schools during the coronavirus pandemic.
 
“House Education and Labor Committee Chairman Bobby Scott (D-Va.) sent Redfield a letter last week asking him or a CDC designee to testify at a hearing on how K-12 public schools can reopen for in-person classroom instruction this fall. But on Friday, Scott said his panel had been informed that the Trump administration would not allow CDC testimony at the hearing planned for next week.
 
“‘It is alarming that the Trump administration is preventing the CDC from appearing before the committee at a time when its expertise and guidance is so critical to the health and safety of students, parents, and educators. This lack of transparency does a great disservice to the many communities across the country facing difficult decisions about reopening schools this fall," Scott said in a statement.
 
This reportage is wholly inadequate to the challenge Caligula represents. It is old-style reporting. It attempts “objectivity.” Strives to be “temperate” and “measured.” In so doing, it treats the times we are now in as normal.
 
They are not. There is nothing “normal” about what is happening in America today.
 
First, she writes, Caligula “rebuff[s] House Democrats' effort to hear testimony from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield on safely reopening schools during the coronavirus pandemic.”
 
“Rebuff”? Really? That’s all you got? “Rebuff”? What Caligula is doing is denying congress information necessary to its governance, and, more importantly, necessary to keeping innocent children and dedicated public servants safe. It is criminal. And all our report has by way of description is that the crime represents a wimpy little “rebuff”?
 
Criminals do not “rebuff.” What the criminal in the White Outhouse is doing here ought to make every head spin; make everyone sit up on the edge of their chair. “What? He will not permit someone with information that can save innocent children’s lives to share that information? What the hell is going on here? He is going to get people killed!”
 
O.K. Fine. She doesn’t get it. She has lots of company. But it gets worse. This next bit of “worse;” this next bit of wimpyness is not on the reporter. It is on another official—one who ought to know better. What is his response to Caligula’s crime? Yip, you guessed it, treats it like a “rebuff.” Writes he,
 
“It is alarming that the Trump administration is preventing the CDC from appearing before the committee at a time when its expertise and guidance is so critical to the health and safety of students, parents, and educators. This lack of transparency does a great disservice to the many communities across the country facing difficult decisions about reopening schools this fall.”
 
“It is alarming.” 
 
“Now there’s some intensity adequate to the danger.”
 
Hardly.
 
Not even close.
 
Not unless he follows it up with about fifteen other negatively descriptive nouns.
 
It is “alarming,” to be sure. But it is so much more than this. For God’s sake, the “rebuff” is going to get people killed! It is positively murderous. Let’s call it what it is: “Premeditated Murder.” It is a crime against other human beings: a “Crime Against Humanity.”
 
But in the mouth of an old-fashioned prophet, useless in our new age, “Premeditated Murder” and a “Crime Against Humanity” becomes a “lack of transparency.” In the official’s desire to “rebuff,” Caligula, we are informed, “does a great disservice.”
 
I guess if allowing someone to needlessly die is a “great disservice” this useless prophet is a genius. But, what I hear is someone who doesn’t understand the evil that he is facing. Either that, or he is a coward.
 
“Communities, across the country,” this measured prophet states, are “facing difficult decisions about reopening schools this fall.”
 
Oh, really. You think? “Difficult decisions”? Yes, I guess “life and death decisions” are “difficult.” But come on, Bobby. Say it like it is:
 
“Communities, across the country, are facing life and death decisions about reopening schools this fall. The tyrant sitting in the White Outhouse is blatantly and criminally denying us the information we need to save innocent children. When children and teachers die of the plague, as they certainly will; when children and teachers take the virus back home to their family members who then die of the plague, as they certainly will; the blood of innocents will be on Caligula’s hands, and the hands of all those who support his despotic ways.”
 
Then, let us pray to God that we are not too hardened, too unprincipled, too perverted, or too depraved to round him and his fellow henchmen up, strap them to uncomfortable chairs, and shoot them full of the most deadly and slow-acting chemical concoction we can conceive.”
 
The people are hardened. They are past feeling. Their ears are stopped—stuffed with the materialistic stuff that they love above all else. Preachers, apostles, prophets, politicians, journalist—watchmen and shepherds all—need to step up our game if we are to be heard by our depraved sheep. If we are to be instrumental in saving a corrupted flock from the ravenous wolf and the destruction that he is so wantonly bringing down upon them, we must learn to speak with thunder and lightning. If not, it is we who will hear thunder and lightning, and then find blood dripping from our fingers.
  
“My sheep wandered through all the mountains,
   and upon every high hill:
yea, my flock was scattered upon all the face of the earth,
   and none did search or seek after them.
Therefore, ye shepherds,
   hear the word of the LORD;
As I live, saith the Lord GOD,
   surely because my flock became a prey,
      and my flock became meat to every beast of the field,
because there was no shepherd,
   neither did my shepherds search for my flock,
but the shepherds fed themselves,
   and fed not my flock;
Therefore, O ye shepherds,
   hear the word of the LORD;
Thus saith the Lord GOD;
 Behold, I am against the shepherds;
   and I will require my flock at their hand,
and cause them to cease from feeding the flock;
   neither shall the shepherds feed themselves any more;
for I will deliver my flock from their mouth,
   that they may not be meat for them” (Ezekiel 34.6-10).

"Ye are swift to do iniquity but slow to remember the Lord your God… and he hath spoken unto you in a still small voice, but ye were past feeling, that ye could not feel his words; wherefore, he has spoken unto you like unto the voice of thunder…” (1 Nephi 17.45).