I always thought that “suicide watch” was meant to prevent suicide and not to watch one. I thought that was a good line and then I find out that this Jeffrey Epstein character was taken off of the watch. Deep state characters and “sinister forces” of course are being bandied about and many of us look around and remember all the time things like this have happened. This is a Federal Correction Agency that was watching him, in other words, the federal government. How many times have we heard the federal government screw something up and rather than admit some kind of foul play or illegal activity they will admit incompetence and stupidity and negligence. Too much to handle, this one guy in prison, who is a flight risk and has already supposedly tried to do himself in. Guards were tired and working long hours and some how the cameras in the jail, no doubt installed at great taxpayer expense were not working.
Let’s think about it one more time. This is a federal institution that has one job – hold people in a cell and keep them alive until they go to trial. That is all. They don’t have to guard prisoners and do something really hard like, let’s say, hand out drivers licenses. They get a high profile criminal in their custody who, many people think, is connected to high officials and politicians and has enough dirt on them to bury their reputations and take away their fortunes. He is a pedophile, someone that even the slimiest criminal will hold in contempt and try to kill in jail or in prison. At some point one begins to wonder. Either there is a conspiracy to murder this guy and protect the other deep state actors, or, there is massive incompetency in the federal system. The pile up of missing e-mails (that supposedly the Russians have), the loss of information on federal agency corruption, reports of billions of dollars that disappear every year from different programs and this over the years, billions of dollars going to places like Baltimore and garbage still backs up in the streets, etc etc, makes incompetency seem very likely.
Now think of this – the fed’s can’t keep this one guy alive in jail, but we have 20 folks running around Iowa promising that if they get in charge of the Federal Government, they will change the climate of the earth and make the sun cool down. They also promise to give everyone lots of cool stuff, but the Godlike ability to change the climate is the one I find fascinating.
Jesus in the Gospel lesson from Sunday asked a great question. Who can add one inch to their height or an hour to their life? The word used for inch is the same as the word used for life span that’s why we sometimes get confused. It is the same Greek word from which we get “helix”. Anyway if we can’t do those things, or keep one very important prisoner alive in a Federal holding facility what makes us think we can “fix” climate or any other major societal problem without God’s help and a return to an understanding that we have a creator.
There is the rub – denial of God as Creator and provider. This is a worthy discussion on the nature of hubris and how it can take us on a suicide watch.
