The angels don\u2019t play here anymore. The angels have gone away.<\/p>\n
They flew away when the selfishness and shallowness rose up in clouds and blocked the last feeble tendrils of sunlight that once shone on me. Now my everydays have turned into discordant dirges defining a darkness where only demons and devils dance to the discordant music.<\/p>\n
The angels don\u2019t play here anymore. The angels have all gone away.<\/p>\n
Musing now\u2026<\/p>\n
I can barely remember when the angels flew near and watched over me and I lived blessed by their love. I can vaguely remember the beautiful silver glint of the sun\u2019s reflection off sweet golden angel wings. It was a beautiful and fortunate time in my life yet I was blithe and cavalier and I took those lovely angelic halcyon days for granted. I deserved them after all \u2014 I had them coming to me. The universe owed me.<\/p>\n
In my life the angels have come to visit me quite a few times but I never appreciated them when they were here. I took them as my due \u2014 I was special and I deserved the blessings of life.<\/p>\n
But then I realize it\u2019s not just my life the angels have abandoned; there\u2019s a dearth of angels in this sad world of selfishness, avarice and hate.<\/p>\n
On the news site yesterday, I saw a ten-minute clip of millions of starving children in Africa and didn\u2019t see a single angel there. What I saw were ravaged children with bloated bellies, being caressed by weeping desperate mothers who were more than helpless to provide nourishment to their own babies. How often those poor people have had to watch their children die… hearing that last weak and futile scream for something, anything, to eat.<\/p>\n
But the world is awash in money and food is everywhere – wasted everywhere. Still I watched as a a poor mother tried to feed her family of three young children with a pitiful soup made from a six tiny leaves she plucked from a sickly tree that grew nearby. This will be the last meal she\u2019ll make from that tree this season. There are no more leaves left on that tree.<\/p>\n
I watched as a mother\u2019s tears dripped onto the distended belly of her starving child and watched as the mother wailed in abject grief when the child died in her skinny weak arms. I watch as the mother\u2019s tears ran in rivulets down that poor child\u2019s belly.<\/p>\n
We spend trillions on wars and cars and guns and cell phones and makeup and gourmet cuisine. We deserve it \u2013 we are somehow the chosen ones, but is only by dumb luck we weren\u2019t born in a place like those poor mothers’ children. It is only by providence that we never did haved to feed our children with a few shriveled leaves plucked from a sick gnarly tree.<\/p>\n
While I\u2019ve been busy on my tablet and you\u2019ve been busy on your smart phone, ten-thousand more poor, helpless children died and the most we can say is \u2013\u201cWhat a shame. Pass the butter please. What can I do about it?\u201d The biggest shame is that\u2019s what we always say \u2014 we shrug and say \u201cit\u2019s too bad\u201d and go back to worrying about the really important things like a new computer, our Facebook pages, buying a new phone or finding a new person to date – you know “the one!”.<\/p>\n
The angels don\u2019t play here anymore. The angels have gone away.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t recognize them when they were here before. All the good things that came my way when the angels were here have long since been perished ins swirling clouds of shallow selfishness and the endless quests for self-validation and self-gratification. That quest, of course is always futile. The angels don\u2019t play here any more. They\u2019ve long since flown away.<\/p>\n
Somewhere the sun still shines pallid and weak. It will never be as sweet or as warm or as bright as it was when the angels graced my life. The demons and the dark sad, sick birds of death circle around waiting for my spirit to relinquish the last frail ounce of hope I have managed to keep inside.<\/p>\n
The angels don\u2019t play here anymore. There aren\u2019t many angels left in this world of deep yet shallow darkness. While I wrote this, 12,000 babies just starved to death while our politicians spent enough on getting elected or re-elected in that same span of time, to have saved every single one of those poor, dying children and ten times as many more.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s easy to say, \u201cwhat can I do about it?\u201d and carry on with our lives and our shallow pursuits. But I can\u2019t seem to can\u2019t get the images of that mother\u2019s tears rolling down her dying baby\u2019s bloated belly. I look around. I seems to me we\u2019re all so selfish and self-centered, and some so greedy, and some so needy, that we actually believe that saying \u201cwhat can I do about it?\u201d is a valid excuse. With excuses made we then can go about our lives and forget how terribly those poor starving children suffer. Though we turn our faces away from the horror. Our thoughts drift away from that suffering… but all the while children and babies are starving to death. And a mother’s tears drip down off the poor starving child’s body and drop silently to the parched earth below.<\/p>\n
As long as we don\u2019t have to look at them or be reminded of them, the \u201cwhat can I do about it\u201d excuses us and assuages our tender consciences; ignoring their plight allows us to pursue really important things:<\/p>\n
\u201cWait until I tell my Facebook friends about my new boyfriend.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWait until everyone sees my new boat (new car).”<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t wait to get until the new iPhone. comes out!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re going to dinner at that new four-star restaurant tonight. I\u2019m so excited.\u201d<\/p>\n
Right now all I can see in my mind\u2019s eye are all those poor, starving children. I know that every single one of them could be easily fed for a week with the food I throw away every day.<\/p>\n
But what can we do about it?<\/p>\n
The angels don\u2019t play here anymore. They angels have all gone away.<\/p>\n
What can I do about it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Angels Have Gone Away The angels don\u2019t play here anymore. The angels have gone away. They flew away when the selfishness and shallowness rose up in clouds and blocked the last feeble tendrils of sunlight that once shone on me. Now my everydays have turned into discordant dirges defining a darkness where only demons and devils dance\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13582,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[228],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14563"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14563"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14568,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14563\/revisions\/14568"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}