This Bonhoeffer class** ending has me reeling on how we so desperately need a way to bring home the horror of the EcoCrisis in much the same way that the world came around to SEEING and “letting in” the horror of the Holocaust and Hitler.

People are much less prone to accepting war when it is brought right up on them personally, rather than up close in more conventional, pre-airvatrike or large munitions warfare. Similar to that “privilege” of detachment and distance, we are, in the Anthropocene-stricken U.S., behind the gated communities like large swaths of the U.S. which can afford the “privilege” of staying cool and/or warm and sheltered and “sandbagged” and “walled” from the ravages of Ecological upheaval.

This is the major reason why the poor are so hard hit. They have less protection, and not only that, they are almost entirely dependent on the “good graces” of a habitable climate, which much larger portions of humanity have had for most all of human civilization.

And now the vulnerability spreads. And we desperately need a narrative and communications that bring the reality of all this home to more of us, and hopefully BEFORE it becomes so obvious that we have also been rendered for less capable and devoid of resources to put up a good fight.

** An online class to which I’ve been connected since November, exploring the life and theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Hosted by Tripp Fuller (of Homebrewed Christianity podcasts) and Jeffrey Pugh. It was there that I heard Tripp articulate the language I used in the title of this post, in reference to the call Bonhoeffer saw for the church to question the legitimacy of the behaviors of the state, rather than simply legitimating it by adjusting their theology to accommodate it.