Psalm 73, Reflection on evil, balloons, and peace

 A movie most people don't know about, which shows up on TCM sometimes, is On the Beach.

It tells the story of several people living in Australia. All of them are Americans. The situation: the Northern Hemisphere has been destroyed by nuclear weapons, and the fallout is moving south and will eventually take Austrailia., There is no escape; they are waiting for their deaths. 

There is some good bits in it. Gregory Peck stars as a high-ranking submarine officer whose family has all perished while he was underwater with his crew. Ava Gardner is his love interest, a rather dissolute beauty, and there is Fred Astaire, not dancing a step, and Anthony Perkins (not being weird in this one, but a straight forward officer on Peck's ship.) They are waiting, dealing with the coming end of life in Australia when the winds bring the fallout, against the backdrop of how the Australians are dealing with it. (One flaw is that it is too American-centric, of course.)

In one arc, the submarine goes back to San Francisco and one sailor, totally protected in Hazmat suit, goes to a station to find out why there is a constant telegraph signal--perhaps there is life still. It's very well done, and the telegraph machine is simply malfunctioning due to a venetian blind cord.  Twilight Zone startle. 

I can't help thinking about that movie with this balloon floating over the northern half of the country and that will apparently be over North Carolina today (kind of close). Since I find it hard to trust anything the Chinese Communist Party, which controls the country, says, I also find it impossible to believe it's a weather balloon that just got off course, since there is another one in South America.  

And of course, there's Ukraine. Ukraine is a modern day parable of Psalm  73. Why is Putin doing this? Why is he getting away with this genocidal attack? Why doesn't God stop it, as we are praying?

We UnitedStatesians (a word I have adopted from the Spanish estadounidenses) take our safety for granted and worse, don't get that most of the world lives with a more fragile peace. From a human standpoint, we live in a dangerous world. Like Asaph, if we let ourselves, we can find ourselves in despair over the power the evil have and how they use it for their own devices, seemingly without consequences. Even if they get their comeuppance (and I think here of "investors" like Sam Bankman Freed or Bernie Madoff, who ruined people's fortunes), they destroy lives. Destruction is the evil of this world; construction is the good. 

Only in the sanctuary of God (a metaphor for so much) do we find the answer. 

My Franky planner quote for the day on February 1 was from Kenneth Boulding: "Peace is the skillful management of conflict." This is the best humankind can do. God will resolve all conflict and injustice, and without that hope, where are we?

(All that said, we should shoot that thing down as soon as it's over Atlantic water, since Biden didn't have the wherewithall to do it sooner.)