POSEIDON: THE EARTH HOUR HAS STRUCK

The thunder of Zeus be upon you, O mortals!  The hour of gloom has arrived!

But fear not, mortals.  For in your darkest hour—8:30 to 9:30 pm last Saturday—I, the great and terrible Poseidon, was completely available to you.  Should you have desired my presence or guidance, say in matters of religious worship, I would have been able and willing to oblige you.

And yet I received no prayers.  No worship, no devotion, no thoughts, no afterthoughts.  It is as though you want your triremes to be sunk!

Fools!  Do you not sense my power?  Do you not believe we immortals to be guiding the hand of fate?  Do you not see that I am as good a god as any?

My seas are rising, mortals.  My fury boils the very oceans.  So you find an hour of night to leave dark in my honor.  And I see the great landmarks of the world grow dim: the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Empire State Building in New York, the dome of St. Peters in the Vatican—that crackpot outpost of newfangled monotheism.  (Give me a good Parthenon any day.)

But your hearts weren’t in it.  You believed Earth Hour to be a symbol of the need for conservation.  But you did not believe me to be the symbol of that symbol.

I cannot go on waiting by the phone for you to pray, mortals.  There are better things for we omnipotent deities to do with our Saturday nights.  Athena has been calling again.  I still enjoy being with her, but all she ever wants to do is talk about the old days, and that’s just not constructive for me at this point.  She acts as though we should forget ourselves because we’ve been forgotten.  That feels like a cop-out to me.

I refuse to move on, mortals, for my hour will come!