Moses To Mexico

The weather continued to be overcast and cool, with temperatures in the low 60’s during the day and down to the mid 40’s at night, with intermittent rainfall, keeping the rivers and waterfalls at their peak. Sometimes the rain diminished to a fine spray beneath the low hanging clouds, that kept the grass and foliage moist, allowing them to flourish, until the coming summer sun would scorch them brown. Bad weather was always welcomed by taxi drivers, who then drove the people who refused to walk, bike or even wait for a bus, in the rain.

A light sprinkle required the wipers to remain on pulse, as number 44 pulled up to the address that he had been picking up Ronnie at for the last 12 years, since he began driving a cab back in the late 1990’s. Except this time when he knocked on the door, a stranger answered it and said that he would be right out. Number 44 waited in his cab, and assumed that an out of town visitor was staying with Ronnie’s family. Once the man came out to the cab, he told #44 that he was going to North Salem Church of God’s Holy Fire, just like Ronnie always did. On the way there, #44 found out that he was driving Ronnie, the former incapacitated young man who had cerebral palsy, and was continually praying that God would heal him, so he could be normal, like everyone else.

“You say that you are Ronnie, the same guy in a wheelchair, that I’ve been driving for the past 12 years, who could barely get in and out of the cab?” Number 44 asked his passenger.

“Yes sir,” Ronnie answered, and explained that he had been healed by an evangelist, 2 weeks ago, at a healing service at the church, and had been completely normal since then. Shortly after the church service he heard the word “teleo” in his mind, and after that he could walk. When he talked to his pastor about it, he told him that it was a Greek work, spoken by Jesus, when he was on the cross.

“It was the last thing that he said, before he gave up the ghost,” his pastor told him. “Translated into English it means, ‘it is finished,’ and refers to completion or fulfillment, his pastor said.

Number 44 scratched his head and decided that it was time to buy a lottery ticket if this joker wasn’t bullshitting him.

Ronnie said that he was going to go back to school, at OSU, where he dropped out, twenty-five years earlier, when he was a sophomore, in the electrical engineering program, after he became incapacitated by the disease. He said that he had an idea for implementing a miniature electron accelerator as an anti gravity generator, to replace fossil fuel for propelling automobiles, and even airplanes and spaceships. When he dropped Ronnie off at the church #44 headed back downtown.

The dispatcher announced that the police had put out an APB concerning a male, with a red baseball cap, white T-shirt and blue eyes, who just robbed the Muchos Gracias Mexican restaurant, on State Street. The paranoia about racial profiling prevented the bulletin from mentioning whether or not the perpetrator was Caucasian, Asian, Negro or Hispanic, so once the thief tossed his cap and changed his shirt, he would disappear. I was talking to #52 and #26, when the announcement came over the radio.

“You know?” I said, “it’s Moses’ fault that we have this immigration issue with Mexico right now.”

“What do you mean?” Number 26 asked. “Mexico wasn’t even a country back then.

“Okay, here’s the deal,” I told #26 and included #52, “Sometime around 1200 BCE, the Semites swarmed in on Palestine. According to the Bible, Moses led them out of Egypt, through the Sinai Peninsula and into the Promise land. Unfortunately for those inhabitants, who inhabited the promise land, God told the Semites, who the Bible calls the children of Israel, to kill them all. A systematic pogrom was instituted, but after all the men, women, children and animals of a couple of cities were exterminated, the army lost heart and decided to try diplomacy instead.

However, they already put the fear of God into many of the inhabitants, so some were considering their options. One of the civilizations that had achieved a certain degree of sophistication, in the region, were the Phoenicians. So they decided to expand their territory West, by creating settlements in North Africa and Spain. These settlements became Rome’s greatest enemy, next to Greece. In 146 BCE Rome defeated both Carthage and Greece militarily, but Spain continued to flourish, until the Renaissance, when it financed Christopher Columbus.

Five hundred years later we find the colonies of North and South America independent countries, and even world powers. However, the battle continues over who lives where, and controls what, but the bottom line is, if Moses didn’t lead the children of Israel into Palestine, we wouldn’t have an issue in Arizona today. The dominoes have been falling for over 3,000 years, and this is the bottom line.