Uncle Sam is a fat old boomer. He’s that creepy dude buying drinks at the strip bar because he believes the server’s promises. The old man is up to his eyeballs in debt, needs little blue pills to get it up, and stays breathing thanks to a slew of medications for heart disease and diabetes. His SSA check appears in his account and disappears again in minutes once it shows up. Why? Credit card debt and bills. Somehow, though, we keep toying with him believing his bullshit. That he’ll take care of us and we won’t have to do any adulting.
Utopian visions, if they can’t account for trouble, quickly become brittle. I’ll make this challenge. Name for me a utopian scheme for organizing a village. One that promises to achieve Acts 2:42-44 without the annoying influence of religion. Name one that succeeded without some sort of private trade. Where everything was held in common and “from each according to his ability to each according to his need” was achieved. I’ll wait.
Functionally Dysfunctional
Anabaptist communities aspire to this. Trade, though, is a part of how it is lived out. And these are religious communities, so if part of the vision is to eliminate God, fail. Even where the community refuses to recognize a living god, the hunger for one stubbornly remains. This world that we live in is functionally dysfunctional. It works most of the time for most of its inhabitants. But our LARPing radicals lose their shit when the few who can’t or won’t stick with the program act out. They have no answer.
The current utopian visions on offer want the fat old man to be tall, dark, handsome, in shape, emotionally available, rich, and pliable, but not too pliable. The wish list is a grab bag of conflicting fantasies. The tough news? The longest lasting common pot communities shared some features–they had a rule, a vow, expulsion, shared worship, and often a side door to markets (sale of goods, outside wages, later differential pay)–the adulting stuff some wish could be kept out of the fantasy. Take the religion and the discipline out and the commons runs to the end of its half-life.
Two things never disappear. Our God-sized hole in us and the outliers. The universities taught our kids that God really is dead. Then that science has the answers so we should trust the science. Anthony Fauci was the anointed high priest of the Holy Church of Science. He may still have his acolytes. But SCIENCE as a replacement for religion didn’t go so well. Voltaire, “Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer.” So much for killing God. The second thing is trouble. This world is both light and dark. It is pairs of complementary opposites. One of those pairs is those who mostly behave and those who don’t. Those who mostly behave don’t get on the radar much. The few who don’t make a mess of any utopian scheme for governing us.
I Like Tuesday
The revolution I want won’t be televised. It won’t go viral. The sun will traverse the sky. We walk our seven stages of life and mayhaps leave a better legend than those before us. Today’s headlines are on fire. Muslim extremists are desperate to force the apocalypse they believe comes before their utopian dreams. It’s election season, so the fight for attention is louder than usual. But . . . the most dramatic thing across the street from me is the work of the trash truck mechanics. On social media, the world is at war. On my street it’s just Tuesday.
The war on what we believe and how we ought to behave is ancient. Jesus of Nazareth became the most influential dissident in Western history. The war in the Middle East is just the latest outbreak of zealotry but with better asymmetric weapons. What sets Christ apart is his incredible claim that he came to defeat sin and death. No other religious tradition I’m aware of has a leader making that claim. So the Marxists needed God and His Son to stay dead. Thankfully, God ignored that need.
I’ve listed my core beliefs in this space before. I’ve been Presbyterian my whole life. The Anabaptists’ modest life is attractive to me. Living simply, mayhaps monastically, makes sense. I don’t do well with detailed instructions. Give me a cardinal direction and turn me loose. That said, a routine that includes daily, structured prayer grounds me.
Boomer the Younger
We elected a firebrand, twice. With an interlude where PaPaw, HRH Obummer’s bag man, tried to deliver the money to the Peepul. Bring the downtrodden here, give them the places of privilege occupied by the bougie. It was the harbinger of a New Eden where everyone would behave; no one would have too much or too little. Then we had a national election and voted for the firebrand again. Because the bag man said a lot of nice things to us, and his words turned out to be lies. We figured out that he hid his age and health problems well. Spanx, just saying.
So here we are. We wanted change. We wanted leadership that believed in fiscal responsibility. DOGE was cheered. FINALLY! some adults in the seats of power. An ugly truth about recovery—the first one to five years are bad. It feels like choosing recovery was a mistake. Some of us relapse and get back on the merry-go-round that had us in a spiral of worsening sickness. We are in a bad way because we saw the fat old man naked and voted for a firebrand instead. It’s early days, and it doesn’t feel good.
The answer is “steady as you go”. Talk to anyone who started recovery and stuck with it through the early years. Things get worse before they get better. There are relapses. Jail time may not stay in the past, depending on what the addiction or dysfunction was. Life hurts worse for a while. The words of the fat old man, on some level, sound like the move.
The Younger, Slimmer Old Boomer
Salmon Voldemort is the firebrand with better tailors. He came in to unleash change on DC. Boy howdy, he did. That city is in an uproar.
Republicans have the Senate, fifty-three to forty-seven. Thune runs the calendar. That is enough to rumble the city. It is not enough to pass the SAVE Act. Thune said the quiet part: he doesn’t have the votes.
The old guard has been on defense since before Salmon Voldemort’s first win in 2016. He lost in twenty, and the old guard thought they were safe. He won again in twenty twenty-four. This term is the shot. He has been busy. They are playing not-to-lose. We will see what November does with that.
Meanwhile …
All of it is a world away from this block. Twice a day the street wakes up—people leaving for work, people coming home. The houses keep the ones who stay. That rhythm is the majority life. The fat old man and the slimmer one in the better suit? Meh.
Most of us already know the weak place. Not the enemy of the day. The place in the house. The bill that waits. The prayer we skip. The person we talk over. The habit that still tells the origin story while the years have spent the one who started it.
No self-help book is required for that inventory. The books sell a new self. Tuesday asks for the old one, slightly more honest. You do not need a noisy march that ends in gas in the street. That is another spike. It feels like meaning and then morning comes and the truck still needs a mechanic.
Life Goes On
The familiar rhythms endure because they do not need an audience. Leave. Work. Come home. Cook. Pay what is due. Say the office if that is your rule. Check on the fuller-time inhabitants who never clocked out. Walk your stage of the seven. Leave a better legend than you inherited if you can, and a smaller mess if you cannot.
DC will keep being DC. It is paid to rumble. Fifty-three is not sixty. The firebrand will call that betrayal. The old guard will call it survival. Both will be sure they are still the person they were at the first win. The addiction does that. It outruns the host and keeps the old name.
Let them. Your street is not a constituency of the calendar. It is a place where the sun traverses whether or not the SAVE Act moves, whether or not November is kind to anyone’s self-image. Put the energy where you already know you are thin. That is not retreat. That is adulting. The fat old man promised to spare you from it. The slimmer one with the better tailor promised to smash the room so you would not have to keep the room. Neither promise is a life.
Steady as you go. The first years of that feel like a mistake. They are not. They are the majority life, practiced on purpose, on a quiet block, while the city shouts at itself and the fat old man stiffs another exotic dancer.