Yesterday was Big-News-Tuesday. Do I mean the streamer headline in the NY Times from the New Hampshire presidential primary? That was big news, and I will get to it – but much much bigger news came from that cook-stove of Hell, the US Supreme Court. The Court, by a 5-4 vote,  delayed for at least a year the effective date of the President’s Clean Power Plan -- -- and hinted at cancelling it altogether. That’s the plan that requires states to work out their own plans to meet a federal standard for reducing CO2 emissions.  Its practical effect is that many coal power plants will have to be shut down – not overnight but with all deliberate speed. So Big Coal went to court, through a number of bought-and-paid-for governors, to insist that the Earth must still be poisoned for their profit, that coal dust must continue to spread epidemics of asthma in the children of Black and low-income neighborhoods. That the very breathing of the Earth must be choked. The NY Times reports:

"The 5-to-4 vote, with the court’s four liberal members dissenting, was unprecedented — the Supreme Court had never before granted a request to halt a regulation before review by a federal appeals court. “ 'It’s a stunning development,' Jody Freeman, a Harvard law professor and former environmental legal counsel to the Obama administration, said in an email. She added that 'the order certainly indicates a high degree of initial judicial skepticism from five justices on the court,' and that the ruling would raise serious questions from nations that signed on to the landmark Paris climate change pact in December."

But even more important than the serious doubts it will inspire among the world’s governments is the damage it does to Mother Earth herself. To Gaia, the interwoven eco-system of eco-systems that make our planet a living being that the human species has the power to destroy – or heal. To YyyyHhhhWwwwHhhh, the Holy Name of the Holy One Who is the very Breath of Life. Already we are decades late in healing. Already Exxon –-  and not Exxon alone,  but the American Petroleum Institute that brings together the power of most of the Big Oil Carbon Pharaohs – have made us decades late by lying about what they knew. They knew in the mid-‘70s, from their own scientists speaking honest in-house truth, that their business plan was a plan for burning Earth. So instead of changing their business plan, they bought “scientists” to lull the US public into thinking there was no danger, and bought politicians to prevent the democratic process from stopping their arson of the planet, our common home. This is the same 5-4 Court that invited the Hyper-rich to pour an unchecked flood of money into our elections – the Hell-bent Five hoping to swamp any possibility of democratic grass-roots politics.  Overturning a century of settled law on the ground that like actual human beings, corporations are entitled to “free speech,” and that money is speech. The Five ignored the real free speech of a sign I saw at a climate protest: “Corporations were not created in the Image of God.” And it was the same 5-4 Court that cut the guts out of the Voting Rights Act that at the cost of brave and devoted deaths had tried to make sure that Black Americans were fully part of the democratic process. The same 5-4 Court that thereby invited many states to create new forms of suppressing votes by the Black and by Hispanics, by the old and the young, by the poor. It is true that a slightly different 5-4  version of the Court  upheld the rite of marriage as a Constitutional right for  all, including same-sex couples --- a wonderful advance in human rights.   But that decision did not weaken corporate power. And it is corporate power that the Court has now once more protected.  It has enabled the Corporate Carbon Pharaohs to keep imposing modern Plagues on the Earth and its human earthlings-- on the poor who are flooded because they live by the rising seas and go hungry when the blazing heat brings droughts upon our farmlands, on the babies who are born with damaged brains because the Zika virus is suddenly spreading among mosquitos that are reaching into new zones of heat. It is clear that only a grass-roots movement can renew the democracy that American have sought  -- and sometimes failed —to achieve. So now let us turn to the New Hampshire news. “Trump and Sanders Win New Hampshire” shouts the NY Times in an on-line headline that stretches across the front page. In some on-line editions, the headline shouted “Routs.” What were these routs? In the Democratic primary,  Bernie Sanders won 60% of the vote. In the Republican primary, Donald Trump won 35% of the vote. So did the major front-page stories explore in depth the meaning of what happened in the Democratic Party? No, the in-depth stories were all about the Republicans. I understand that the so-called “moderates” in the Republican Party are so divided that Trump may triumph despite his only-one-third vote. I understand that the mildly liberal Times is frightened by the prospect of a major party nominee who speaks not only the racist, xenophobic, woman-fearing, torture-loving, war-addicted policies that together make up fascist policy, but does so with contempt and violence against his critics that  is the hallmark of fascist behavior. So I understand why the Times was so hypnotized by the results in Iowa that seemed to damage Trump and the results in New Hampshire that seem to enthrone him. And I understand why their editorial policy was to endorse the incremental, cautious liberalism of Hillary Clinton over the “political revolution” that Bernie Sanders calls for. But all that does not explain or excuse their muting their coverage and exploration of what is happening inside the Democratic Party. Both the Trump and Sanders eruptions come not just from personal charisma. They betoken two simultaneous but utterly different paths for grass-roots American response to crisis. And not just in America today. We have seen this here before, and we are seeing it now in other countries. In the 1930s, there were two utterly different responses to the crisis of a deep world-wide Depression. In the US, there was both a wave of ant-Semitism  -- turning fear against the “foreigner” – and a wave of labor strikes and sitdowns that energized what became the New Deal.  Here the New Deal, and its expansion of democracy, won out. In parts of Europe, the same internal struggle ended with the radically anti-democratic victory of Fascism and Nazism. Today the crisis is not only a squeezed and failing middle class, the globalization of Hyperwealth, the destruction of jobs as automation, computerization, robotization are used to maximize profits instead of increasing workers’ pay and time for family, neighborliness, grass-roots politics, intellectual growth, spiritual enrichment.  Disemployment outruns the need for honorable work and joyful livelihoods. The crisis is not only a transformation of violence and control into terrorism, torture, intrusive surveillance of unprecedented breadth and depth, drone assassinations, fear of the spread of nuclear weapons beyond the allegedly “responsible” Great Powers. The crisis is not only a cultural and spiritual upheaval in which religion, education, communication in journalism and the arts, sexuality,  the family, are all shaken to their foundations. The crisis is not only floods of refugees and immigrants, driven by despair and beckoned by hope, that destabilize the societies they are leaving and frighten the societies they are seeking. The crisis is not only the nonviolent uprisings of the poor against the police brutality that has long been a custom, a habit, ignored by comfortable America --  and not only the nonviolent uprising against rape of women at elite and middle-class colleges – a kind of casual brutality that has long been a custom, a habit, ignored by comfortable American men and often, comfortable women.  The crisis is not only a seriously, perhaps mortally, wounded web of life as the human species has known that web, been nurtured in it and by it, ever since our birthing. The crisis is all of these. We are living in God’s earthquake. There are three possible responses to an earthquake:

Denial. Ignore it. Keep walking, and if a broken building falls on us, kills us, too bad. What else to do, when everything is changing? Grabbing hard at something that just might be immovable. “Christian white America, run by men – real men, not sissies." Seventeenth-century religion  --triumphalist and rigid --of all strands:  Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu.  Workers without troublemaking unions. Cops in control. Dancing in the Earthquake.  Hardest to do – for the dance floor itself is shaking, rolling, swooping, dancing. But the most life-giving choice.

What does it mean, to dance in God’s earthquake? Tomorrow – and tomorrow and tomorrow, dances in its grace en-musicked pace to the first sung syllable of not-yet-recorded time. Tomorrow I will share with you some thoughts, some grace notes, of what dance steps might whirl us –- living!  -- through the earthquake.