“Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the Earth.” Matthew 5:5. Really? Oh, were this to be true, how awful I would feel for the meeks if they had to inherit our globe the way it is today. What could they do with it? No matter how many romantic songs we hear about our wonderful Earth, like Louis Armstrong’s “It’s A Wonderful World,” it really isn’t, for millions. It is a great world for some, however, the lucky ones. But the balance is way off and it’s getting more lopsided as the decades pass.

Are you meek? Am I? “Meek” in the vernacular of the day means a lot of pretty negative things: spineless, lacking in spirit, docile, resigned, even henpecked. You know, your basic wuss. So, if all of us who are meek out there think that perhaps we are all, or some, of the above, do we ever actually want to inherit this old Earth? I sure don’t. If this world is going to be handed to me because I’m meek, then meek is what I do not want to be, although I am actually very, very good at being that.

But let’s face it. Your meeks simply could not handle the unending problems of our Earth — war and drugs and starvation and thirst and disease and humans’ inhumanity to humans, to say nothing of those everlasting Earth hiccups: tornadoes, mudslides, forest fires, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, dust storms, tsunamis, typhoons, etc., which many ecclesiastics know perfectly well are caused by a wrathful God to punish us for condoning all those same-sex marriages and working on Sundays.

I don’t know. For me, a card-carrying meekish, it seems that an inheritance of all that chaos and annoyance, brutality, sexism, growing pollution, homophobia, bigotry, shattering wars and secret poisons in all our foods would hardly be much of a gift. Not at all.

But actually if I have this right, “meek” way back when that statement was made, you know about the meek guys inheriting the Earth, in fact when all those heavy, meaningful statements and rules were being made by men with only one name, it meant something else entirely. Back then, meekness did not mean spineless or timid. Back then if one was meek, one was “capable of great power kept well under control.” Not exactly the meeks of today, right?

Take Moses. If all we’ve heard is true, you know from that book and that movie, he stood tall against Pharaoh Ramses who was one formidable dude. Pharaohs did not take kindly to upstarts who parted seas of any color and led great rabbles of folks who insisted they were God’s people straight through a wilderness to the very borders of a land called Promised.

But then, maybe today’s meeks could handle today’s world, if in fact they were meek like meeks were two or three thousand years ago and not like your meeks of today. I mean today’s meeks really couldn’t do it. What an awful gift from — well, I’m not sure who’d be giving our Earth to the meeks, but honestly I think it’d not be such a good gift to get. Today’s meeks really wouldn’t want this world. What would they do with it? Sell it? To whom? Martians? Trade it? For what? Pluto? Doubtful.

We’ve made such a mess of things here on this tiny speck of rock whirling about in the universe, that even at bargain basement prices, we’d never be able to unload this inheritance. We can’t seem to leave things alone. We can’t seem to just live and work in harmony, with animals, nature, and people in general. We have to hurt and destroy and suck dry this Earth we should be nurturing and loving, and we can’t seem to stop. Nor do we appear to actually want to. We really think that because we recycle a few cans and bottles that it’s OK for us to heave a katrillion tons of used diapers and computers into the landfills every year and leave them there. Honestly, folks, meek or aggressively obnoxious — and I’m not sure those words are the opposite of meek but it’s the best I can come up with — if we were to inherit this Earth, we’d probably treat it the way we’d treat an inheritance of an old relative’s treasured sterling tea service; we’d groan, stash it and bash it, would never polish or use it properly, and yet would occasionally show it off at its best on auspicious occasions only to make us look and feel good, as if we actually care about it, which we don’t. And after the end of that auspicious occasion, we’d quickly go back to our old ways of mistreating and abusing our Earth hostess.

Because you see, we can’t be meek, in the old, old fashioned sense of the word. Were we, we’d be standing up bravely for ourselves and our ball of dirt, keeping it groomed and healthy and covered in peace. We just cannot be that kind of meek, and so luckily for our precious Earth, meek, mild or something in between, we’ll never inherit it anyway. Maybe some other beings should inherit it. I’ll wager they could manage it a whole lot better than we’re doing.

LC Van Savage is a Brunswick writer.

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