Thou shalt not act like total dicks.

I was watching the Ten Commandments for the fourteenth time last night (you know, because I simply can’t get enough Yul Brynner) and it struck me, as I watched that scene toward the end of the movie when all those kooky Israelites carried on with the golden calf, that the Israelites must have suffered from a serious case of group amnesia.

Think about it.

You are an Israelite leaving Egypt after 400 years of captivity (a miraculous occurrence in and of itself). Upon your escape, Moses summons a PILLAR OF FIRE FROM THE SKY and then parts the Red Sea right in front of your face. That is not exactly one of those things that you can simply explain away the way that Ramesses rationalized the plagues—“Well, you know, locusts happen sometimes. And so do frogs and lice. This is Egypt, for Christ’s sake.”
The parting of the Red Sea was some crazy miraculous shit.

So, Moses parts the sea on Tuesday.
Now it’s Thursday, and the Israelites have already moved on to a new god. They were awfully quick to turn on Moses. What did they think, that they were just going to bamf to the Promised Land?
Come to think of it… they wanted to stone the poor jerk, literally, every seven minutes during the film.

It's time to face the facts: God’s chosen people were total dicks.

I'm thinking that if I witnessed a miracle on such a large scale, I would be inclined to give the man until—oh I don’t know—at least the following Monday to get my ass to the Promised Land before I started smelting all my jewelry for idolatrous purposes.

Nothing has really changed in the thousands of years since the Old Testament. People still whine like babies and turn on you if they don’t immediately get what they want. I could draw a thousand contemporary parallels, but I’ll spare the word count. We, as a species, are a bunch of impatient, whiny jerks. I once believed that our society’s need for immediate gratification coupled with our obnoxious collective short-term memory resulted from modern factors like commercialism or over-dependence on technology, but I was wrong. So many ancient stories corroborate the idea that it has always been this way. I don’t know if I should feel slightly relieved to know this, or if I should feel hopeless about the human condition in general.

In all of our selfishness and impatience, we fail to realize that the journey is just as important as the destination. And, sometimes, that journey takes forty years. In the desert. With no flushable toilets. And you know what else is equally as important? Having a little faith in people. Correction: Having a little faith in the right people. If you are forced to rely on someone to move mountains for you, cut them some slack.

Therefore I propose the following amendment to the 10 Commandments:

11. Thou shalt chill the fuck out and keep thy goddamned pants on.

Love, my flaming bush.