Give this man a prize...

...for a pretty clear-eyed look into the future from back when. One of the more dubious privileges of retirement is that I get to clean off my desk at home, where reside the unread articles printed from the internet and tosed into ever-growing stacks. The other day I came across the piece linked above, a series of predictions by Robert Reich in the spring of 2004 about what might happen in a second term of the Bush administration. Apart from a misstep that has Rumsfeld as national security advisor and Wolfowitz as defense secretary, it's pretty much on target -- except that we have, in addition to the woes Reich enumerates, the unexpected surprise of all these indictments, issued and still to come. "The moral arc of the universe is long," said Dr. King, "but it bends toward justice," and we can all hope for that.

All this just goes to show that karma still operates, that "what goes around comes around": or, in the formulation that has been coming to my mind lately, "God is not mocked." For more along these lines, there's a nice old essay from The Christian Century that ends with these words:

Maybe the only comfort we the comfortable can legitimately embrace lies in the realization that God cannot be forever mocked -- that his [sic] grace will not forever endure ridicule, that the mockery of easy American Christianity will not endure forever. Perhaps our deliverance will come when we can hear those very different words of Paul, "God is not mocked, for whatever a man sows, that will he reap" (Gal. 6:7), and find in them incredibly good news.