Awaiting Our Firmware Download

​Recently I became aware of this tech term, firmware. It was in the context of a “recall notice” we got online from Tesla. There was a problem, the notice said, with our Model 3’s windows such that they might open and close without our having played a role in the action. Not to worry, however, the notification continued. Tesla was working on the problem and as soon as they had it sorted, they would send the car—not us!—a firmware [sic!] download to correct it. Meantime, they advised, keep an eye on the car’s windows, So, what, I wondered, was “firmware.” I knew that ancient term “hardware” and had a sense of what software was. But “firmware,” which somehow sounded like a truss or a splint? Enter google.com to the rescue. Firmware, per that electronic wizard, is “… a specific class of computer software that provides the low-level control for a device's specific hardware” (Firmware - Wikipedia). In other words, it is quietly capable of running the whole show...

Now, let’s beam back some 2,600 years to the time of Jeremiah the prophet. (That good friend of mine, the bullfrog, came several millennia later.) As a Scorpio, I love the dude’s passion: he calls a spade a SPADE. But besides animadverting about the failings of his people, he has a sunnier side as well. My favorite passage in that regard is Jeremiah 31:33-34. There we read, “The days are surely coming , says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. . . . I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the lord,’ for they shall all know me from the least of them to the greatest, say the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.”
           
​Great! This sounds like a good final solution to the age-old, endemic problem of humanity’s inhumanity. I mean, enough of social PT, supplements, and medications. It’s clearly time for surgery, and heart surgery at that. I did all the “less invasive” things for my carpal-tunnel syndrome, which was keeping me up at nights. Nothing really worked. But once I had what’s called carpal-tunnel-release surgery, I never had another sleepless night, or at least sleeplessness caused by a hand that itself painfully feel asleep and kept waking me up! The evil behaviors of the Kingdoms of Judah and Israel sound like child’s play in these days of Trump, Xi, Kim, and Putin. Help! So my question of the week to you, me, and whoever else will listen is when will this Divine firmware be downloaded in all of us, from the greatest to the least. For once that happens, we can have the Peaceable Kingdom foretold in Isaiah 11:1-9, a time when (11:6) “The wolf shall live with the lamb; the leopard shall lie down with the kid; the calf and the lion will feed together, and a little child shall lead them.”

Edward Hicks (d. 1849), “Peaceable Kingdom”