No More Gaps

This may sound like a paid advertisement, but it isn't. I have found the perfect thing for fixing my imperfect carpentry and the uneven effects of weathering. It's called “No More Gaps.” It comes in a plastic, bullet-shaped tube that fits into a metal trigger-gun that squirts out a trail of the stuff under pressure. And it's just what the occasional handy person like me needs: a generically named filler-glue that describes exactly what we need for those cracks in our work.

There also used to be great gulf between straight-heterosexual marriages and gay-homosexual partnering, but that too has closed up considerably. More and more, legislatures and law courts are signing into history edicts that recognise gay marriage and the rights that attend the status. And as they do, evidence comes to light that gay marriages are no happier than straight ones. Indeed, gay domestic violence and gay divorce are the latest new areas fascinating sociologists and urban anthropologists.

The closing gap between rich and poor has long been promised by capitalism, but remains stubbornly resistant to the filler-glue called “trickle-down economics.” In fact, the gap appears to be spreading, with little remedy in sight except perhaps for gracious and generous efforts of world saviours and last year's Time magazine People of the Year Bono (the humanitarian rocker from U2) and Bill Gates (of Microsoft) and his wife, Melinda. The root of the endemic gap between the world's rich and poor is found in the soil of perceived inequality of worth. No-one really believes in equality. As Bono wistfully recalled in a recent Rolling Stone magazine interview: “If we believed that these people in the developing world were equal, there is no way that we could allow 3000 Africans, mostly children, to die every day from mosquito bites while we have the medicines and technology that could save their lives” (February 2006).

Another stubborn gap remains between religions. Consider the gap between Protestants and Catholics. Predictions of closing this gap abounded in the post-World War II years as the UN and EU emerged in embryonic forms, as the first Catholic president Kennedy took office, as the charismatic revival took hold of Catholics, and as mutuality was reached on the doctrine of justification. But while the Catholic hierarchy has remained committed to its historic and narrow reading of personal and family morality and an exclusively male priesthood, the Protestants have gone off on their own merry dance denying the historicity of just about everything biblical, relativising every moral stricture, and liberalising every entry-gate into the faith communion.

For these minority believers a vast distance still remains between good and evil, right and wrong, and they actively resist the climate of accommodation that is now preached from nearly every political and religious pulpit. They reject the lukewarmness that characterises our response to everything and accept their pariah-status for adopting a polarised view of life, of values and of the meaning of experience. For them, greed is not good, and there is no need to “just do it.”