Dr. Al Colver, the Director of Church Relations is in the Ukraine and he sent me this picture of the fire equipment at the Seminary there. This is pretty cool stuff and it made me think about modernity. We have the most sophisticated, computers in the world, supposedly, and thousands of Delta flights get shut down for several days because of them. We have government computers that many believe other governments can hack, but the agencies that own them can’t seem to get information off of them to do investigations. We are so sophisticated that we can track (or so we are told) where ransom money sent to Iran will be spent even though it was unmarked bills, and yet we can’t figure out where billions of dollars of wasted money is going here at home. The sophisticated fire trucks and other equipment in big cities can only get to a fire if the traffic is not gridlocked, and in places like California all the sophistication in the world can’t stop disastrous fires that take place year after year
So there is something quaint and a bit sad about something like this picture. Of course fire was a terrible scourge back in the day. The fire alarm was a rooster and maybe a bell after someone heard the rooster crow in the middle of the night. The fire equipment looks painfully inadequate in todays world but it occurs to me that the world is on fire and our sophisticated politicians, teachers, economists, and everyone else are painfully inadequate to deal with any of it.
