Faith & Spirit Quote by Bill Janklow

Janklow reaches for theology to make a very political kind of point: some things are meant to feel too big, too slow, too sacred to be undone by ordinary human malice. “What’s taken God 200 years to create” frames the destroyed thing (almost certainly a landscape, forest, or landmark) as not merely property or scenery but creation itself, a moral baseline. The implied contrast is brutal and effective: nature accrues value through time, patience, and a quasi-divine authorship; the arsonist’s act is fast, petty, and violently human.

The “apparently” does important work. It signals restraint and procedural caution (a politician’s instinct), while still letting outrage land. Janklow wants the emotional verdict before the legal one. By naming “an arsonist,” he personalizes catastrophe into a single villain, which makes grief legible and anger targetable. It also sidesteps the messier contexts that often surround such disasters: land management, policy failures, economic pressure, or systemic negligence. One person’s sickness becomes the story, not the system’s vulnerabilities.

The closing line - “what a sick world we live in nowadays” - is a classic lament that doubles as a diagnosis. “Nowadays” suggests moral decline, inviting listeners to feel that this is not just a crime but evidence of cultural rot. It’s a move that converts environmental loss into a broader law-and-order mood, where destruction of the natural world becomes proof of human degeneracy and, by implication, a mandate for tougher authority.