Killing Barney.

When my son was about 5 or 6 I took him to a minor league baseball game in Somerville, NJ.  During the game, between two half-innings, someone dressed as a purple dinosaur danced out onto the field while the Barney Song (“I love you, you love me…”) played over the PA.  My son was getting a little old for Barney, but he had watched a lot of these shows only a year or two earlier.  So he lit up and pointed the figure out to me, smiling.

I don’t know if he is still on TV, but Barney was a character in children’s television.  His show was for little kids and it was about being nice and caring for each other.  He was surrounded by a diverse set of children who danced, sang, and played with him.  It was good.  

Then, at the stadium, as the dinosaur cavorted near second base, there was the recorded report of a rifle shot, and Barney went down in a heap.  The people laughed and cheered.

My son wasn’t traumatized.  But he was shocked and surprised.  He knew it was fake.  But he turned to me with this quizzical and sad look on his face.  “Why did they kill Barney, dad?  And why does everyone think it’s funny?”  

What was I supposed to answer?  “I don’t know, Dan.”  I said.  “People are nasty sometimes.”  

That was pretty lame, I know.  How do you break it to a 5-year-old that he is  entering into a society that thinks of innocence, goodness, and joy as things to be exterminated with glee.  I mean, it could easily have been Mr. Rogers they had assassinated.  (“Owning the libs” is the term for this kind of thing these days.)

(My son “advanced” to Power Rangers around this time.  Nobody messed with them.)

I find it difficult not to be cynical about America right now, and about the human race generally.  Much of our politics continues to be perverted by a buffoon who thrived on ignorance, cruelty, and lies, and who seems to be enthusiastically adored by at least a third of our people.

The latest novel by Richard Powers is Bewilderment.  It describes the journey of a widower and his 10-year-old son through contemporary America.  The boy is very concerned about extinction and other aspects of our ecological crisis.  He keeps getting met with ignorance, cruelty, and lies.  When he asks his dad about this, the protagonist occasionally just has to throw up his hands, shake his head, and say, “Humans.”

I get it.  

In Glasgow right now our leaders are gathered again to address the catastrophic heating of the planetary atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels.  They are making dire speeches, which is at least better than denying the crisis altogether.  But I suspect the results will be the same.  Too little, too late, if anything.  Our political and economic structures are not designed to deal with this kind of rolling catastrophe.  They are designed for ignorance, cruelty, and lies, mainly.  They are designed to make rich people richer.  They can’t be used for anything else any more than my car can turn into an oak tree.

Humans.

What can we do?  Complain to the authorities: there was no reason to kill Barney?  Like that’ll work?  Someone in an office somewhere was paid to come up with that idea.  He no doubt thought it would be hilarious.  For many he was right.  

I still believe, that is, I trust in God, which means that I know that beneath it all, at the very foundation of reality, is love.  And that what we are seeing now is merely the messy disintegration of our ignorance, cruelty, and lies.  They collapse on themselves with great fanfare and cost.  It’s very painful and violent.  It’s analogous to overcoming an addiction, except as a whole civilization.

I sense that God will not allow the creation to go down.  Our civilization?  That’s another story.

Yet love remains, within everything.  In the Voice of the Creator who called it all into being.  

Maybe we would see that, if we saw through the eyes of a child who was not yet jaded and corrupted by ignorance, cruelty, and lies.  Who was still open to something real.  Still open to the truth.  Maybe that’s what Jesus meant when he said we get into the Kingdom of God only as children.  As people who have yet to be indoctrinated into the regime of ignorance, cruelty, and lies.

“This is my beloved Son.  Listen to him.”

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