Kevin Rhodes The Long Reads, Uncategorized

Oh for the Good Old Days, When Government Could Govern

I’m doing my best, trying to learn to live on the wrong side of the Urban-Rural Divide.

But some days…

Days like today.

Days when I’m just so heartily sick of the conservative water I’m swimming in. I mean, I’m a fish that’s aware that it’s wet. All I’m sayin’.

Today what I’m sick of is bad government. No, not our local government—which is indeed, objectively, factually bad—but I’m talking about government that’s bad by definition—the kind of government that’s bad because government is bad and everybody knows it. At least, everybody around here knows it. Around here, you learn that government is bad about the same time you learn the Lord’s Prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. Kind of the same dif….

Where and when I grew up and lived most of my life before coming here, government was good. Government looked out for you, made sure you were safe, gave you great outdoors places to enjoy, took care of kids and old people, gave loans and subsidies to farmers and downtown businesses. Government kept the parks clean and mowed, put up signs to slow things down and keep things moving, paid for big expensive things like highways and bridges, ballparks with lights, swimming pools, even the fairgrounds that only got used a couple weeks a year. Government built dams and levees to keep the downtown from flooding every year. It kept the reservoirs open for people to fish and take their boats out and sail and waterski. Government helped out schools and hospitals, had a jail where bad guys had to go sit it out for awhile. The list goes on and on.

Government did all that, and it was good. Government did what Honest Abe said it should:

“The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do for themselves, in their separate and individual capacities.”

There’s a lot that people can’t do in their “separate and individual capacities,” so government stepped up and did it for us. I liked it when government did that—when it kept the lights on and the roads smooth and brightly painted and cleared of ice and snow, when government made sure loners had a place to live and an occasional meal on the house, when old people didn’t have to be afraid their life savings might not last.

But ever since Reagan, government has been the problem, and it’s not supposed to make our lives better and safer and cleaner and all the rest because it’s bad when government does that and it’s good when we have to fend for ourselves. Fending for ourselves—they call it “privatization”—builds character. The whole country’s moral compass will suddenly start spinning out of control if government helps students learn to think or helps sick people get better. Character will go right down the creapper if government makes sure people who worked hard all their lives and had to spend everything they made to get by—and never quite did—have a steady income when they get to the stage in life where they just don’t have enough gas in the tank to keep on keeping on. I mean, there’s a time when there’s no point in trying to build character anymore, isn’t there?

Educational opportunity and a chance to own your own place and retirement security and food security and healthcare security—all those government-sponsored opportunities and securities—made life better. But now government-sponsored opportunity and security is about as bad as it gets (unless you’re a high-tech startup doing research for DARPA). We’re supposed to take care of all that ourselves now, in our “separate and individual capacities.” Government doing all of that is just so wrong that every now and then the people we elect to govern us have to threaten to shut the whole thing down just to remind us how bad government is and how evil we are if we ever think it would be nice if life was safer and more secure and we had more chances at outdated noncharacter building things like upward mobility, whatever that is.

When I went to law school I learned the same thing I’d learned in ninth-grade civics class:  that government is what created our country—that government is why we have something called the “rule of law,” which we Americans have always thought was a better deal than the rule of whatever some rich and powerful guy thinks is a good idea depending on his mood.

Our rule of law version of government has a Constitution on top. The Constitution was created by and for us people—for our “general welfare,” which I guess means the stuff we can’t do for ourselves in our separate and individual capacities. And then the Constitution created other layers of government to make sure the rule of law applied everywhere. The first level down was the states, who took care of big stretches of land and the people who lived there. And then the states created all kinds of smaller, more local governments like towns and counties to get into all the nooks and crannies where people wanted to live—places like where I live now.

All the way down through the layers, government did what it’s supposed to do, and when it didn’t it was held accountable. Well, sort of. In law school I found out that government had long since figured out how to not be held accountable for what it did or didn’t do. The kings—the rich and powerful guys who got to do stuff depending on their mood—used to be treated that way. They called it “the divine right of kings.” Then, when the colonies got rid of their king they set things up do we could have “sovereign immunity,” which is why Trump and the Republicans think they can get away with whatever the hell, no problem. I was surprised to learn about that, for sure, but the law professor assured us it was a good idea. I mean, if we didn’t let government off the hook now and then, who would ever want to govern? Made sense to him. Me, I’m still trying to work it out.

So all along, from ninth-grade civics class through law school, I thought government was good, and that life was better when government governed, and that part of government governing was when people were held accountable for not governing or for doing a bad job of it. Law school set me straight on the accountability part, but I’m still stuck back in my middle school thinking that the whole rule of law thing actually works best when government is allowed to govern, because when it does good things can happen. I mean, that’s sort of what voting is for, isn’t it? In fact, when people in government don’t govern anymore and spend all their time doing whatever it is that people in government do when they don’t govern—namely, try to make themselves into somebody who’s above the rule of law like the kings were—well, in my world that sounds bad.

But these days all my neighbors are sure I’m wrong about that. All of that stuff I used to think about government—and still do, as a matter of fact—is bad now.

Bad government.

Bad, bad government.

Like it’s an untrained dog.

What I’ve learned from my “government is bad so don’t even think about it” neighbors is that any time the government at the top tries to do super-big stuff, that’s just the worst, as bad bad dog as it gets. It’s especially the worst when government wants to raise money to govern, and even more especially the worst when raising money means equalizing things out a bit so the people at the top don’t get to keep everything while the people at the bottom have to spend everything they make and it’s still not enough. We used to call that “fairness.” Now it’s called “economic equality” or just “equity.” But no matter what you call it, it’s still bad, like government.

Let’s see… fairness in governing is bad, and that’s a good thing.

No wonder I’m confused.

And out of touch.

I mean, I still think it’s amazing when the rule of law can include rules about how to make sure we really are a country where “all men are created equal.” You know, things like everybody gets to go to school, everybody gets to earn enough to make a living, everybody gets to walk down the street and go into shops and restaurants and ride the bus without fear of getting lynched, when everybody gets to breathe clean air and see clean scenery and not worry about what we’re going to do when the average temperature rises by a couple degrees and the Earth burns up… that sort of thing. Also, when everybody gets to vote and pitch in and make sure government is governing.

Seems like a plan, but it’s evil. Probably the United Nations is behind it.

These days government isn’t just the problem, it’s just flat-out evil that the Constitution put the federal government on the top of the heap—I mean, what were the Founding Fathers thinking?!—and then the federal government gets it into its collective head to well, um, govern. Everybody around here knows that’s the wrong way to go about having a country, that it’s way better if the states just get to run things and all have their own rules of law about who’s free and who’s not, who can vote and who can’t, who can have an abortion and who can’t, who can drive at night without being afraid of getting pulled over and choked to death by the police… oh and make sure people read the right books and learn history the right way. All of that is vital and necessary and important to citizenship, but the states are up to it—at least, that’s what the “government is bad” people think. To me, it sounds like the states do a lot of bad governing, but what do I know.

It’s a special problem around here that our state government is also especially bad because it’s in the wrong political party’s hands. I’d talk about that, but at that point there’s just too much nuance for this article to handle. So back to my main point:  I liked it when it was okay for government to be the good guys, when you could look at the flag and listen to patriotic songs and feel happy and good and proud. Now, you see a flag and it’s like seeing gang colors and you think you must have crossed a boundary you didn’t know was there and right at the moment you wish you’d never been born. And if the flag has the same design but different colors—like a black and white American flag—or if it’s both different colors and upside-down—you know you’re really screwed. Add a MAGA flag or a “Let’s Go Brandon” flag and put them in the back of a pickup and it’s one hundred percent certain you’re in a place where “freedom” means the people around you are armed, exercise their right of open-carry, and own a trunkful of military-grade weapons.

Not that it makes me nervous or anything….

All because government is bad. All because the people with the bucks to buy giant yachts and bomb silos to get through the apocalypse with all the comforts of home, who have the kind of money that government used to spend on making life better for everybody, are only interested in spending all that money to finance the campaigns of people in government who think government is so bad they shouldn’t even be there pretending to govern but if they weren’t then some yokel who thought government should govern would be in their place so better them than him.

All the while, I keep wondering, what did government ever do? How did government become the problem when it used to just kind of go along keeping things running okay and sometimes—oftentimes, really—even made life better than it used to be? Okay, sure I get it that government did some pretty crappy stuff to people it officially decided weren’t worth being nice to. That was bad government—bad, bad government—for sure. But for awhile government was actually trying to fix that. Now that government is bad, it doesn’t even get to try to fix what it did bad in the past. It’s just so bad that it needs to sit in the corner and stop its whining. In fact, it seems that one of the reasons government is bad is that it used to try not to be bad and tried to fix the bad things it had done. But then government trying to do better and fix bad things became a bad thing, too. Government tried so hard to do better that it got carried away, and that was bad.

Come to think of it, that must have been when government became the problem. Instead of correcting and adjusting, government went way overboard and tried to fix too fast too many bad things it had done. And then it wanted citizens to help pay for it in the same way they helped pay for the interstate highways—like that’s any big deal. The government got itself all puffed up about how smart it was and how it knew what it had done wrong and wanted to make it better, and then it wanted us to pay for it.

The nerve.

So I guess it was all that trying to make it better that made government so bad. We would all have been better off if government had just stayed in the corner and thought about how bad it had was and then kept its thoughts to itself.

Okay, maybe, but I still liked life better when government got to govern. Seems like a decent thing to do. I also still think it’s okay for government to try to make things better when it governed badly—even if, according to my law professor and my Republican neighbors it’s better if it doesn’t try, and the rule of law just lets the people at the top act like kings if they’re in the mood.

Seems to me that, even when everybody couldn’t agree about what was better, life was still better for everybody when it was okay for government to at least try… to govern, I mean.

I miss those days somedays.

Like today.

Kevin Rhodes Consciousness and the Self, Narratives of Self, Purpose, and Meaning, Uncategorized

How Did We End Up Like This? The End of Cause and Effect

There’s still a lot of things you’ll never know
Like why each time the sky begins to snow,
you cry

Dan Fogelberg, Hard to Say

How did things end up like this? Who could have seen this coming? What did we ever do?

We’re talking about regret here. Mostly we regret our choices. Like our choices matter.

“Simply put, we regret choices we make, because we worry that we should have made other choices.

“We think we should have done something better, but didn’t. We should have chosen a better mate, but didn’t. We should have taken that more exciting but risky job, but didn’t. We should have been more disciplined, but weren’t.”

Why We Have Regret – zen habits zen habits

We’re obsessing about our bad choices and some psychologist comes along and does a study where he concludes that the problem lies in the seams between our actual, ideal, and ought selves. (Davidai, S., & Gilovich, T. (2018). The ideal road not taken: The self-discrepancies involved in people’s most enduring regrets.  Amercian Psychological Association.)

Okay, yeah, thanks. We’ve been down that road before. That we feel regret is all on us.

“Contrary to what you hear in the media or what your friends tell you, living life without any regrets is pretty much an impossible task. It is completely natural to wonder what your life could have been like had you chosen another career path or had you married your high school sweetheart. From huge life-altering decisions to trivial everyday choices—our lives are full of could haves and should haves. It’s what makes us human.

“Importantly though, not all regrets are felt the same. They differ in number and intensity based on the different categories of self-concept. This information could be used to minimize the weight of regret in your own life.

“It all depends on who you are and what you are trying to achieve. If you define yourself more by your obligations and responsibilities (the “ought”), it would be wise to think carefully before making any decisions that involve close others in your life. On the other hand, if you are guided more by your personal ideal, then you may be happier deciding on the thing that move you closer to it.

“The first step, then, in reducing regret: know thyself.”

Why You Feel Regret—and What You Can Do About It | Psychology Today

Not sure I get all that, but I got the last part. Socrates said that. Must be true.

I guess the rest of it means that life is all cause and effect, so the idea is to work on your causes in order to get the effects you want. That’s the regret cure. No wonder the “cause and effect essay” is such a big deal (Google the phrase and you’ll see what I mean). You break the law, you pay. You try to defy the laws of gravity, you die. You put your hand on a hot stove…. Got it. Undeniable. Some decisions are seriously stupid. You’ll be a danger to yourself and others. Don’t do it. But maybe life isn’t quite so linear and scientific and all put together as that. Maybe it’s complex, not complicated.

“Complicated problems can be hard to solve, but they are addressable with rules and recipes, like the algorithms that place ads on your Twitter feed. They also can be resolved with systems and processes, like the hierarchical structure that most companies use to command and control employees.

“The solutions to complicated problems don’t work as well with complex problems, however. Complex problems involve too many unknowns and too many interrelated factors to reduce to rules and processes.”

The Critical Difference Between Complex and Complicated (mit.edu)

We’ve heard that before, too, and it also makes sense. Think about that the next time you’re tempted to say a relationship is “complicated.”

Here’s another regret cure:  If you’re feeling regret, you can grieve your way through it—go through all the stages of grief until you come out the other side. Grief is the earthquake, regret is the aftershock. Deal with the grief, it helps with the regret. The Stages of Grief: Accepting the Unacceptable | Counseling Center (washington.edu)

Only trouble is, grief is a response to trauma, but grief is also its own kind of trauma. Grief puts the flight or fight response in charge, furloughs the part of our brain that makes us feel we’re in control. Memories and emotions hog the stage, banish decision-making and planning. Fear about how we’re going to live without what we’ve lost goes on permanent reruns—our brain has no setting other than “binge.” We feel lost, become disoriented, lose track of time and place. We go wandering, literally and figuratively.

Grief ain’t no picnic, in other words. Might be necessary to stay healthy, but as a cure for today’s severe case of why bother? All this blaming myself and needing to become more self-aware and understanding that sometimes it’s complex, not complicated and realizing I need to grieve my way through to restored mental health maybe gives me some hope that I can get through it, but

It still doesn’t capture why things didn’t work out.

All of that’s well-intentioned and well-researched and well thought through, but how does it help me now?

Here’s a one-word perspective that might help:

Context.

We exist in context. We experience life in context. We find meaning in context. We express ourselves in context. We reach conclusions in context. Context is biological, cultural, environmental, temporal. We create reality in context—both individually and collectively. We take our cues from our surroundings—our physical and temporal and cultural settings. Our bodies and brains construct our reality from what’s around us, including how the people around us are constructing theirs. We share worldview with each other, create shared reality, and build things to support and perpetuate that reality—institutions, architecture, art, economics, law, government, religion, norms and customs, rituals and practices, metaphors and icons, etc. All of that is aggregated and expressed in a coordinated network of brain regions and functions shaped by what’s going on around us.

And there’s a whole lot going on in context that we have no clue about and no control over. There’s a lot we just don’t see coming.

Wait! Say that again.

A lot of things happen that we didn’t see coming. We didn’t choose anything, didn’t do anything—they just happened. They came out of the context we’re living in—which feels like they came out of nowhere because our consciousness doesn’t reach all the way out to the edges of our context.

That’s what I thought you said.

The “Serenity Prayer” has its uses in recovery settings, I get that. But how about if just for a moment we don’t reach for it with our most sanctimonious self and sigh out the refrain about the things we can change and the things we can’t and the wisdom to know the difference? Yeah, wouldn’t that be nice. And yeah, sometimes we need to fake ourselves out and act like we’re wise enough to know the difference. Fake it ‘til you make it. Got it.

But how about if right at the moment we don’t go there. How about if right now we just admit that

each time the sky begins to snow, you cry.

Cool. Good for you. I don’t need you to explain it—to me or to yourself. You don’t need to resolve to make better choices, be more self-aware, go through the grief stages…. Right now, you and me, we’ll just say, cool. I don’t know anybody else who does that. You’re tender somewhere, who knows why. Snow triggers it. Sweet.

You’re human—may not feel like that’s worth much, but it’s a fact, and facts count for something.

At least I think they do.

And since it’s March Madness time and we’re on a Dan Fogelberg tour, how about this:

Your fate is delivered
Your moment’s at hand
It’s the chance of a lifetime
In a lifetime of chance
And it’s high time you joined
In the dance

Dan Fogelberg, Run for the Roses

And the cool thing is, that doesn’t have anything to do with basketball.

Kevin Rhodes Atheism, Narratives of Self, Purpose, and Meaning, Uncategorized

I Deserve It

There are two extreme ways to say “I deserve it.” One is a head drooping shoulders sagging feet dragging despondent mumble. The other is an oblivious not an ounce of self-awareness I fucking rule grand entrance, looking around to see if anybody noticed.

There’s plenty of both extremes out there. They’re archetypes—Carl Jung’s famous term for “a compact edition of people are like that.” Seems we see more of the former, to the point we barely notice. The latter? Hard to ignore and impossible to forgive—unfortunately memorable.

Are they both getting what they deserve? This deserving thing is tricky—it strays into blaming the victim on one side, strides boldly into narcissism and sycophantism on the other.

How about you and me? Are we getting what we deserve?

Yes, always—if you take the judgment out of it and recast it as cause and effect and probable outcomes. Life, it seems, is stupidly predictable—stupid like an algorithm. Put this together into that and you get these results, ranked by probabilities.

Trouble is, our brains don’t run on algorithms. They act like humans—fully analog. Meanwhile life has shifted to running on algorithms. That makes for lots of oops, didn’t mean for that to happen.

The first thing I noticed when I tapped my phone to wake it up this morning is that today is Ash Wednesday. I’m not a Christian, and I don’t do Lent. I didn’t even do Lent when I was a Christian. I thought 40 days of fake penance was a dumb idea then, I still think so now.

Besides, I’m penitent enough already. It’s called self-awareness. In fact, I probably need to confess to the greater sin of Wokeness. Which means I deserve it, by definition. Anybody who’s Woke has it coming. We should know that by now, but we keep trying.

We keep trying because we’re biological beings. Evolution has designed biological beings to keep trying. “Keep trying” is short for “life.” Living is what we do. And keep trying is how we keep living.

Life is biological, and biological design is why we keep trying—also why we can’t imagine our own deaths. Stay with me here. Evolution hasn’t given us any equipment to tell us what it’s like not to be here. So since we’re here we just keep living (and trying) until we reach our expiration date. Until then, life and keep trying are on the agenda—and as long as they are, we keep getting what we deserve.

And we keep not seeing it coming.

We keep not seeing it coming because evolution left life lessons out of the mix. It did that because life lessons don’t help us survive. We don’t need them to evolve. Evolution’s one unchangeable rule is “if it doesn’t matter, leave it out.” Life lessons are included in what doesn’t matter.

Think of the grand entrance I rule guy described above. He wrote a bestseller about how he did it. First thing to notice about his book is he’s a liar. He didn’t do it. He got lucky. Something was going on for him already. There was a context in place—a career, a family or educational or industry background or somebody who had money or … something. Whatever happened next happened out of that context, not in isolation like his lying book makes it sound.

I use male pronouns for the I rule guy because males are statistically (okay, anecdotally) far more likely to sing “I did it my way,” far more susceptible to the delusion that they knew what they were doing when they got lucky. (If you’re wondering why evolution favors male delusion, it’s because it keeps the military funded. War is good for countries—they all do it.)

Which brings us back to Ash Wednesday and Lent and Wokeness. What they all have in common is they’re all reducible to we always get what we deserve. We don’t make mistakes and learn life lessons from them, we just get what we deserve.

Life works like the Efficient Market Hypothesis. EMH says that everything there is to know that’s possibly relevant to a stock price is already reflected in the current stock price—which means you can’t ever be smarter than the market, it already knows everything about stock prices, so trying to outguess it is stupid.

EMH is sort of the capitalist version of a leaf falling in Tokyo that effects the weather in Montreal. Everything that can be known is already known. That means everything you do and think and need to make a decision about already incorporates everything that can be known about it, including the life lessons you might get from making a decision you will regret later.

We’re all connected, Grasshopper. Our lives already know everything they need to know. There’s nothing left to learn.

That’s how evolution works, too, by the way. Evolution runs on an EMH algorithm. You’re not going to fool evolution. You’re not going to do better than the entire destiny of everything there is at any given moment.

You might need to think about that a sec.

Finished already? Okay let’s move on.

Maybe the reason I’m thinking about the futility of life lessons is that penance is in the air today. I mean, with over two billion Christians in the world, and even considering that some of them think Lent is a dumb idea, there’s still enough fake penance in the Ether to affect the vibe. Ash Wednesday and the upcoming 40 days of fasting and prayer (like who actually does that?) are like a whole shower of leaves falling in Tokyo.

We always get what we deserve is why stories of inspiration and motivation turn into cautionary tales. Cautionary tales and lessons learned are both subject to the Great Efficient Market Hypothesis of Life, which means they’re both pointless. The Great Efficient Market of Life already knew whatever it was you thought of afterward that you wished you’d known at the time. The problem is you thought you were smarter than the algorithm ahead of time, so the other side of the trade won. You lost. You were left with the need to just keep living—which meant more keep trying.

Reflection? Don’t bother—next time will be different.

Penance? You already paid it. The cost of what you did that you now regret doing has already been paid. Like withholdings from your paycheck. You haven’t done your taxes yet, but the outcome of your return is already known. That’s what tax law is for. Tax law knows. Just like the Great Efficient Market of Life.

“I deserve it” means I’m fully paid up at every moment. If I just committed a crime, I’ll pay because crime doesn’t. If my startup NFT in Portugal just got lucky, I’ll have a self-help book coming out. It’s there already—the Cosmic GPT has already written it.

The algorithm, remember?

Does it bother anyone else to know that something called a Generative Pre-trained Transformer is writing content that’s… I mean, that’s out there?

Just asking.

The meaning of life isn’t 42, it’s I Deserve It. (Or You Deserve It if I’m talking about you,)

How can you know? Trust the algorithm—it already knows.

So here’s what we do to test the Great Efficient Market of Life Hypothesis. We create our own GPT algorithm. First we upload Howl, On the Road, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and I Sing the Body Electric. Then we get Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey (oh, and the rest of the Merry Pranksters, why not, we got room), early Tom Wolfe, and Walt Whitman in a room… oh wait, Elvis, too, don’t forget Elvis, he’s in the building… and we tell them to all talk at once for ten minutes without pausing, and we upload that too.

We feed it into a self-learning AI and out comes…

This article.

The algorithm, remember?

Kevin Rhodes Religion, Uncategorized

My Life in the Country:  90 Minutes of Eternity

For 90 minutes every morning I’m in the best shape of anybody within a 60-mile radius.

That’s only true for 90 minutes. Before and after… not so much. All the life-hardened old ranchers, the young buck tradesmen, the hunters, hikers, climbers, and snowshoers who tackle these mountains, even the high school kids in gym class—all of them individually and collectively kick my butt all the rest of the time.

But for 90 minutes every morning, I rule.

How do I know? Hey, I know what goes down in gyms and fitness clubs. I know what people do there. I know they’ve got jobs and families and all kinds of life realities sucking the juice out of them all day. I know how much socializing goes on—not a bad thing, but it’s not the same as squeezing out a few more beats per minute.

Why 60 miles? Because that’s how far away everything is. 4-60 is the local jargon. That means it’s 60 miles in any of the four directions until you get anywhere.  Go further, and there might be somebody else working out like I do. I actually doubt it, but let’s not get too carried away.

I’m in the third month of a plan to get stronger, faster, more enduring conditioning out of myself. I’m winning. Last week and this I’m hitting personal bests almost daily. I love exercise metrics. They tell me how I’m doing—really, actually, statistically—not just do I feel better or worse, am I having a good day or bad, but what’s actually happening. And lately the metrics have been telling me I’m kicking ass.

So I’m an exercise god for 90 minutes and 60 miles. Then what?

I go back to being the irrelevant old man that I am.

All the rest of the day, everybody else wins. I know that too, because I know what goes down in normal life. While they’re out there chasing the American dream I’m at home doing irrelevant old man stuff. I write, read, research, learn, create art, cook the meals, clean the house, order stuff on Amazon, unpack it when it arrives. Call me Cinderella—without the evil stepmother and the fair godmother and coach and footmen.

And I feed the beast—I watch what I eat, especially how much protein I’m taking in, carbs and veggies and fruit, too. You have to watch all that to build muscle when your body is done bothering to do it any more, not like it used to. Don’t believe the supplement ads—old men don’t pack it on, don’t get buff.

Me, I do an okay job of not looking feeble.

Big deal.

It took moving to the country for me to finally learn that the three dimensions of my life are small by silly by insignificant. Living where nothing ever happens, where the same issues have dominated the local existence for 150 years and will keep dominating it for as far as anyone can imagine there might be a future.

Yeah, go live where a vast silent emptiness dwells in the air. It takes away your illusions.

We have two kinds of people here who make a lot of noise that breaks the silence.

One is a cabal of right-wingers whose goal in life is to be right—not just right-wing but right as in correct—and to make sure they prove it by taking over all the boards and dominating the elections so that nothing ever happens. They win. They never do anything other than win. They don’t contribute. They don’t make anything better for anyone. They just sit around being right and being angry about being right. They need the anger to keep their edge so they can be right at a moment’s notice. They have lots of guns that they open carry, they love talking about the Constitution like they have the slightest clue what it is, and they make sure American flags always line the three blocks of Main Street so they can remember that they’re free—lest they forget, which I wish they would.

The other kind of people who make all the noise are the Christian fundamentalists who fill the churches every Sunday. They’re right, too. The also never do anything for anybody, never make anything better, they’re just right, and they have lots of meetings where they remind themselves how right they are. Like the right-wing cabal, these people also hold tight to all the ridiculous fantasies of stupid, small thinkers. The cabal knows about guns and the Constitution. The church-goers know the most important thing there is to know in life, which is where you “go” when you die. (Like you “go” anywhere.) It’s impolite and rude and totally wrong for me to talk about how small and silly and stupid the stuff they believe is, but I get to do that because I was one of them, too, for years of my own life in which I traded thinking for delusion.

Those two groups mostly overlap in membership. Both tell you to have a “blessed day.” And both feed the beast, too—although their beast wants more than protein and carbs and veggies and fruit.

Then there are a bunch of other less noisy people who might be okay to know and maybe you could have a conversation with them and don’t have to avoid eye contact when they wish you a blessed day, but never mind because they’re either young and busy trying to make a life here or they’re old and busy with the grandkids and taking trips to avoid the weather.

Which leaves the rest of us—the empty ones, living empty lives in an empty land. And the lesson for us to learn is that’s the way it is for everything biological, which includes us. We go from empty to empty in the span of one lifetime—each of us so minutely insignificant it can’t be registered. There’s no metric small enough to measure the empty span of any biological life, human or otherwise.

The wind blows, then moves on.

We’re gone, and we don’t “go” anywhere when we leave.

The Earth endures, goes from fireball to teeming to flameout. The span takes billions of years, which seems impressive, but the Earth’s span is lost in the span of a universe of immeasurable eons and incomprehensible distances, so anything you can say about us and our Earth is just flat out embarrassing, it’s so small.

Mostly empty.

Entirely empty.

Let’s just say “empty” and leave it there.

That’s what I’ve learned from this empty land and its vain people. Vanity is another kind of emptiness—humans and this land are a perfect match.

Nobody knows about my 90 minutes of kicking it. Nobody’s studying it, recording it, featuring it. Nobody’s impressed by it, learning anything from it. It’s just me, doing the reps. My workout routine doesn’t seek anything, know anything. It won’t “go” anywhere when I’m gone. Neither will I. I don’t tell people about it. Why would they care? I care, that’s why I do it, but does it matter on any scale?

No it doesn’t matter, not on any scale. There’s no scale small enough to measure it. It’s just my life, condensed into 90 minutes that doesn’t matter to anyone but me and even then has no meaning or purpose, doesn’t contribute anything. It just is, and then it won’t be anymore.

90 minutes of eternity.

Immeasurable.

Empty.

That’s what I’ve learned from moving to the country.

Kevin Rhodes Belief Systems and Culture, The Long Reads, Uncategorized

The Great Urban-Rural Divide and the Feudal Pyramid

“The Monday morning after the 2016 election, in a gas station in a logging town in north-west Wisconsin, I asked a group of retired and working men what they thought Trump would do to help them. Ron, a logger, replied: ‘Nothing. Nothing. We’re used to living in poverty, we’re used to it. It ain’t never going to change. How many times we got to tell you that? But you don’t listen.’”[1]

The problem is the Feudal Pyramid.

Seriously.

Rural has been on the bottom of the pyramid for a long, long time. The only way it will ever get out of the bottom is if urban sprawl overtakes and gentrifies it. And then where will it go?

The Feudal Pyramid had God at the top. Then came the king, the nobles, the knights, and finally the peasants. The peasants were farmers, sheep herders, shopkeepers, tradesmen, crafters, crofters—like they still are today. Rural. Country. People “used to living in poverty.”

Where did this system come from?

It came down from the top. From the people at the top of the pyramid. Of course that’s where it came from. Where else would it come from?

God at the top meant challenging the system was challenging God—not a good idea when the church stood ready to torture and burn people who did that. God is what philosophers call a “first cause”—the missing link when you’re trying to explain something by tracing it back through a cause and effect chain and get to the point where you can’t trace it back anymore. That’s when you put a “first cause” in place that gets the whole thing started. You know you’ve reached a first cause when you sound like a parent, “Because I said so, that’s why.”

Nothing caused God, God caused himself. God existed because… because he said so, that’s why. There’s no God exam he had to pass, no professional credentials he had to acquire or memberships he has to maintain, no ethical standard of conduct, no required professional education to stay current, no review board to call him to account. God isn’t accountable to anyone, for anything. He just sits up there on top—way on top—of the pyramid, doing whatever he wants, and everybody else just has to deal.

How would we ever know anything about this totally autonomous and authoritarian God who sits on top of the pyramid dictating everything and everybody all the time without being accountable to anybody or anything?

Because somebody higher on the pyramid told us.

Are we seeing a pattern here?

Rural people like God more than urban people. God in charge? Check. Right below God on the pyramid is God’s “Anointed,” whose job is… well, I’ve never been quite sure what his job is or when or how he gets appointed, which allows for all sorts of improvisation, but as far as I can tell the position can be filled by various people at various times. In Medieval times, they kept it simple:  God’s Anointed was the king.

The USA imported its law from England, where “crown immunity” declared that “the king can do no wrong.” Since God put the king in place, there was no higher human authority than the king. If he screwed up, God could always take him out, which theoretically would keep him under control, but to avoid any debate about whether the king was screwing up or not, crown immunity also declared that the king was endowed with God’s absolute perfection, so it was impossible for him to do wrong—in fact, he couldn’t even think about doing wrong.

Seriously. That was the law. The king wasn’t accountable to anybody—other than theoretically to God—because he could do no wrong. There was nothing to complain about. It was all good.

The New World colonists thought all that sounded like a plan, so they brought the legal concept with them. And when they got tired of the King of England doing no wrong they kept the legal concept of “crown immunity” but gave it the new name “sovereign immunity,” which meant that their newly anointed President (and people in certain other governmental positions) can do no wrong while they’re governing the people who are lower than them in the pyramid. And if their buddies get in trouble, there are also Presidential pardons to pass around.

Seriously. That’s what our law says. Nice to know our legal system is doing its part to keep the feudal pyramid intact.

I still remember learning about all that in law school. “Government has to be free to govern,” our law professor explained, “If you start holding government liable, nobody’s going to want the job.”

Oh well yes of course. Why didn’t I think of that?

God in place? Check. President and his buddies in place? Check. Next came the nobles and then the knights. The nobles were the capitalists and demagogues and one percenters of their day—the wealthy and powerful, elitist and entitled captains of land and industry who hung around the halls of power and fretted over whether they were extracting enough blood from turnips. The peasants grew the turnips. They were also treated like turnips when it came to blood-letting. The nobles funded the knights—the military-industrial complex of the day.

The nobles bitched about the king and his taxes, but not too loudly, and the knights could go rogue but their Code of Chivalry mostly kept them in line, so the whole thing went along mostly as planned—every level of the pyramid accountable to the one above and free to mess with the people below all they liked, and every lower level careful to give due respect and pay their duty to the level above.

Except for the peasants. Being a peasant was a one-way proposition. They owed a duty of servitude to everybody above them, but had no one to lord it over. All they could do was bully each other and complain about the people above—pointlessly, fruitlessly, vainly. Mostly, their duty was to suffer their solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short lives. Every now and then some idealist would lead an eventually brutally-crushed rebellion on their behalf, but mostly they carried on silently, sullenly, hopelessly… if they knew what was good for them.

That’s what it meant to be Rural. It still does.

“It ain’t never going to change.
How many times we got to tell you that? But you don’t listen.”

It seems that civilization isn’t ready for the people on top governing for the general welfare that poly-sci idealists occasionally dream of. Doing that would make the people on top accountable to the people below.

Not going to happen.

We’re apparently okay with the feudal pyramid and crown and sovereign immunity because we need government and laws and institutions to keep life from being even more solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short than it already is. Which is why the guys (the Founding Fathers’ pronouns are definitely male) who talked about “live, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and wrote in the Preamble to the Constitution that one of its purposes of their new government was to promote the “general welfare” also declared that a slave counted as 60% of a person.

The Bible helpfully explains that God never meant for the pyramid to be necessary—what he wanted was a direct relationship with his people, but the ancient Israelites looked around at the kingdoms they were destroying and thought it would be good to have a king like them. The request made God mad and the people were clearly acting like the sinners they were, but God complied with the request, and since then we’ve had the pyramid.

So the pyramid is all our own fault. We asked for it. We wanted it this way.

And where do you suppose that explanation came from?

From somebody at the top of the pyramid. We’re definitely seeing a pattern here.

But like everything else, the pyramid has changed with the times. Now we have another reason to keep it around:  so we can climb it. Or more accurately, to keep the myth around that we can climb it.

Climbing the pyramid is one of the greatest frauds ever foisted on the human race—right in there with “peace on earth, goodwill toward men.” As usual, the fraud lands hardest on the people that could most benefit it if were actually true.

The member of the month at the gym where I used to work out was a guy in his early 20’s. One of the “get to know me” questions asked “Who motivates you the most?” His answer: “My dad, who taught me that hard work can give you anything, as long as you can dedicate time and effort.”

The answer is predictably, utterly American. “Hard work can give you anything”—yes of course, everybody knows that. Parents tell it to their kids and the kids believe it. America is the Land of Opportunity; it gives you every chance for success, and now it’s up to you. “Anything you want” is yours for the taking – and if you don’t take it that’s your problem not America’s.

But don’t blame the Republicans, because they’re doing their best to banish government and its character-destroying handouts from our lives so the free market can make everything all better, which is why they voted in unison against the infrastructure bill and since then have been lining up for its evil socialist handouts.

A lot of those Republicans lining up are Rural. They just get smaller shares out in the hinterlands.

Back in the day they’d have a greased pole at the county fair. Guys (always guys) would try to climb it. Everybody would watch and laugh. That’s the myth of upward mobility in action. The pyramid doesn’t want to be climbed. Climb it, and you bring it down, expose it for the system of servitude it is. The pyramid says hey don’t blame the rich if you’re not rich. I mean, give ‘em a break—they’re up there making you work your butt off so they can get rich enough for their riches to trickle (trickle, not flow) down to you. If the people on top help the people below they’ll get lazy, the nobles won’t get rich anymore and then where would we all be?

And Rural is okay with it. Rural loves the Republicans, loves capitalism, “free” enterprise, the “free” market, everything “free.” Rural don’t need no stinking handouts. Rural is content to wait around for the trickle that never comes down.

Go away. Just go away. Leave us alone. We can take care of ourselves out here. That’s what we’ve always done while you townies namby-pamby around. Nothing’s going to change anyway. Thus our hyper-inequitable hyper-privatized hyper-monetized hyper-capitalism keeps Rural in its place. That’s how the pyramid works. All that onward and upward isn’t true, and we know it. Rural people work really, really hard and still don’t get what they want. It’s part of the deal, down at the bottom. Like the man said:

“It ain’t never going to change.
How many times we got to tell you that? But you don’t listen.”

Of course, plenty of Urban people are also game to tackle the greased pole. Why? Why do we keep saying and believing something that isn’t true? Because to do otherwise would be un-American. This is where Rural steps up again. Rural is where the Real Patriots are. Patriotism elevates the boast:  America doesn’t just offer opportunity, it gives everybody equal opportunity—just like Teddy Roosevelt said:

“I know perfectly well that men in a race run at unequal rates of speed. I don’t want the prize given to the man who is not fast enough to win it on his merits, but I want them to start fair.”

Equal opportunity means everybody starts together. No, not everybody wins, but still… no matter who you are or where you’re from, everybody has the same odds. None of that feudal pyramid class system here.

Fair. Free. Every man for himself. That’s Rural.

Except equal opportunity is not true either, and we know that, too. And it’s especially not true in Rural.But that’s another self-evident truth that’s been grooved into our American neural circuits since the beginning:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the .pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”[2]

We’re all equals here in America, divinely ordained to pursue the good life. That’s our creed, and we – “the governed” — declare that we believe it.

Even if it’s not true.

And one place it’s especially not true is—you guessed it—Rural America. But Rural doesn’t care, because equal opportunity is a foundational American cultural belief. Cultural myths are sacred – they’re afforded a special status that makes them off limits to examination. And national Founding Myths get the highest hands-off status there is—especially in Rural, where they’re especially not true. History and hindsight have a way of eventually outing cultural myths, but in the meantime the fraud is perpetrated, and attempts to expose it are shunned and punished as disloyal, unpatriotic, treasonous.

Welcome to Rural, where American myths are sacred. You don’t mess with American myths out here, even if they’re killing you.

If we can’t out the myth, what do we do instead? We blame ourselves. We confess that we weren’t smart enough, didn’t work hard enough, didn’t “dedicate the time and effort.” Or maybe we did all that but in the wrong way or at the wrong time. Guilt, shame, embarrassment, frustration, depression… we take them all on as personal failings, in the name of preserving the myth. God helps a lot with all of that—reminding Rural people every week that they are, after all, a bunch of sinners.

Ironically the ones who see through it are—you guessed it—the people at the top who got in before they closed the gates behind themselves.  Meanwhile, the people below—the decimated middle class, the new poor, the working poor… keep blaming themselves.

“I can’t pay my bills, afford a house, a car, a family. I can’t afford healthcare, I have no savings. Retirement is a joke. I don’t know how I’ll ever pay off my student loans. I live paycheck to paycheck. I’m poor. But it’s not my fault.”

Try saying that to Dad at the dinner table.

Horatio Alger is dead, but the equal opportunity myth stays alive on life support as American parents teach it to our children and elect politicians who perpetuate it, while all of us ignore the data that no, it really doesn’t work. Maybe 150 years ago when Horatio Alger was around. But now? No, not now.

“It ain’t never going to change.
How many times we got to tell you that? But you don’t listen.”

There’s no more enduring version of the American upward mobility myth than the rags-to-riches story codified into the American Dream by Horatio Alger, Jr. during the Gilded Age of Andrew Mellon, John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, and the rest of the 19th Century Robber Barons. If they can do it, so can the rest of us, given enough vision, determination, hard work, and moral virtue — that was Alger’s message.

Except it never worked that way, especially for the Robber Barons. There’s a reason they were called “Robber Barons.” They were ruthless opportunists aided by collusion and cronyism carried out in the absence of the antitrust and securities laws that would be enacted under the New Deal after history revealed the fraud.[3] But never mind that — according to Roughrider Teddy and politicians like him, government’s job is to guarantee equal opportunity for all, then get out of the way and let the race to riches begin.

There’s just one problem:  Horatio Alger told an urban story—you didn’t go from rags to riches by staying down on the farm.

Oops.

Still, every Rural high school is haunted by the local boy makes good story (usually male pronoun, although these days it’s usually a local girl who makes good). The local boy/girl is an underdog, and everybody loves an underdog—loves the upset, the incredible comeback, loves it when there’s no way but then all of a sudden the bigger, stronger, tougher, richer, better equipped opponent gets a comeuppance. The Rebel Alliance, La Résistance, the Miracle on Ice, David vs. Goliath—too many examples to list—we love them all.

The underdog story is about the reversal of power. The underdog tips over the pyramid. The peasants rise up, storm the gates. It’s not just that the weak win, it’s that the weak win over the strong. The pecking order is reversed. There’s always somebody with more brass, more money, more creds, more of whatever it takes to put us down and keep us there. In school it’s the principal. At work it’s the boss. In life, it’s death. But not this time. This time we win.

Underdogs and Horatio Alger and local kid makes good are the best kind of heroes. Their kind of heroism gives our lives meaning and purpose, sends us on quests and missions, makes us something other than the small, confused, barely getting by people living in a big confusing scary world that we really are. Heroism makes us suddenly bigger, better, grander, nobler, transcendent, immortal—the stuff of legends. Heroism makes us live forever.

Except heroism is Urban, too, and in its heart Rural knows it. Urban is where heroism gets funding. The only heroism funding out in Rural comes from government handouts, which we God-fearing Republicans know are evil.

So don’t get uppity. Who do you think you are? The people on top don’t owe you anything.

And don’t you have some work to do?

[1] The great American fallout: how small towns came to resent cities | Cities | The Guardian

[2] The Declaration of Independence.

[3] A great source for all the American history we never learned is Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism, Bhu Srinivasan (2017).

Kevin Rhodes Belief Systems and Culture, Uncategorized, Utopia/Dystopia

Goin’ Up the Country—The Great Urban-Rural Divide

I’m gonna leave this city, got to get away
All this fussing and fighting, man, you know I sure can’t stay

Goin’ Up the Country, Canned Heat (1968)

Better beans and bacon in peace than cakes and ale in fear.[1]

Poverty with security is better than plenty in the midst of fear and uncertainty.[2]

The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse. Aesop’s Fables (2600 B.C.)

Thinking of moving to the country?

Think again.

And again.

Keep thinking until that dreamy-eyed feeling goes away. Then I’ll order us some cakes and ale and we’ll talk about it. (I’m good with beans and bacon, too.)

And that bit about escaping fear and uncertainty? Yeah right. Fear and uncertainty are so everywhere nowadays, there’s a new Zen proverb for them:

Wherever we go, there they are.

Covid told us we can work anywhere, so why not in Arcadia’s rustic innocence simple quiet idyllic pastoral untroubled bliss? Don’t worry too much about roughing it—Arcadia comes with upgrades—nouveau-chic country home décor, country clothing, tools that feel substantial and life-affirming in your hands, plus microbrew and wild-caught salmon all delivered up the stone steps to your front door. Plus a gig of internet at the local co-working space.

Don’t fall for it. The Covid country craze was mostly a rumor.[3] It’s not that the makers of nouveau-chic country stuff were out to deceive you, the problem is you’re trying to deceive yourself.

I know these things because I’ve spent the last year living in Non-Arcadia. Writing this, I look away from the screen and the view is not just a mountain but a whole mountain range. There’s a life lesson in that view:  getting here isn’t climbing one peak, it’s crossing the whole range. We’ll call it the Great Urban-Rural Divide, and it’s not about geology, it’s about sociology—two sociologies, in fact—urban and rural are so sociologically different, each has its own branch.[4]

The Great Urban-Rural Divide is about worldview. Urban vs. rural worldview has been endlessly polled[5], conferenced over, and written into doctoral theses, but the pollster findings and academic papers don’t capture the essence. To get that, you need to experience it. Worldview isn’t about data and analysis, it’s the whole package of how we think life works—what’s safe and real and true and normal. And what’s not. Worldview runs in stealth mode—it operates in our assumptions, perceptions, prejudices, biases. It does its work while we’re not looking. And that can be a problem.

Worldview on one side of the Divide isn’t the same as on the other. You can’t just cross over and still be who you are now. We’re so used to celebrating our personal power and self-efficacy and freewill that we think if we zap ourselves from our current circumstances to somewhere else we’ll still be us, the same as we are now, living the same kind of life—a few adjustments to make, but otherwise we’ll fit right in.

Nope. Doesn’t work that way.

Worldview creates context. Context matters. We exist in context. We experience life in context. We find meaning in context. We express ourselves in context. We reach conclusions in context. Context is biological, cultural, environmental, temporal. There are huge contextual differences between urban and rural. The differences aren’t just a matter of taste, opinion, political preferences, educational levels, gender identity… the two worlds simply aren’t the same. The people on one side aren’t like the people on the other. Sometimes, the differences are so striking you wonder if they’re the same species.

The Great Urban-Rural Divide got a lot of attention after the 2016 and 2020 elections.[6] It seemed like something new but it’s not. Aesop wrote his fable The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse 2600 years old. It was probably inspired by his experience of visiting Delphi. Aesop was a country boy—his world was poverty with security, beans and bacon in peace. Delphi was bigtime urban—the Greeks thought it was the center (the navel) of the world. Plus there was Apollo’s temple and the famous oracle, and an impressive view of Mt. Parnassos… it must have been quite the scene.[7] Aesop met his end when his stories insulted the Delphians so much they threw him off a cliff. (Or made him jump, some historians clarify. Um… how exactly to you make someone jump off a cliff? Apparently the gods were country people too—legend is they avenged Aesop’s death with famine and pestilence.[8] I’m not buying that the gods were unanimous in their judgment—several of them had some pretty cosmopolitan tastes.)

I have a middle school memory of experiencing the Great Divide at Boy Scout camp in the Minnesota north woods. A troop from the Twin Cities had the campsite next to ours—we often took the same road to the main lodge at the same time. It seemed like I was always walking behind this one guy… He wore sandals and frayed white bellbottoms, had a keep on truckin’ way of walking, and he was always talking, always seemed to have a lot to say, was always holding court, had this cocky self-assurance.

He was like a one man sideshow. Mesmerizing. He didn’t demand attention, he assumed it. I didn’t know anybody like that. He entirely personified everything I’d ever felt when I met kids from the Twin Cities. When we had big dances—like homecoming—whoever arranged that kind of thing always brought in a band from the Cities. Our chaperones kept a wary eye. City kids knew things, did things. They were tough, cool, confident. Their high schools were a jungle. They had gangs. They had cigarettes and sex and beer.

They made headlines. We just read them.

They weren’t like us.

“Not like us”—three words that tell you everything you need to know about the Great Urban-Rural Divide.

On the country side, “not like us” often comes with a judgmental edge. They don’t get us. They don’t appreciate us. They can’t be trusted. We don’t want them telling us what to do. We do fine without them. The urbanites, on the other hand, don’t seem to care. Yeah, rural is out there, they vote differently but we outnumber them so sucks for them. Rural feels neglected and unappreciated and threatened while urban goes about its noise and haste. Rural is out there doing whatever it is that rural does while urban heads to the oyster bar with friends, with plans to catch the game later.

I was one of the smart kids in high school. My destiny was scripted—I would leave for college and never come back. Nobody knew what people did out there, but everybody knew that kids like me would go do it. It was the way of things. So I went to college where pretty much everybody was a city kid. They were smarter, talked about books and writers I’d never read, liked music I’d never heard, planned to major in subjects I didn’t know about, had been to places I wasn’t aware existed. I ran to catch up. By the time I graduated, the differences were gone on the outside, but there was still a lot of country on the inside.

My college sweetheart and I graduated and got married as the 70’s were making their post-60’s swerve into the 80’s. There was a back-to-the-land movement happening—one of many in a long historical line.[9] Where I came from was suddenly trendy. Living on a farm was suddenly cool. We had Mother Earth News and the Whole Earth Catalog. We had Dylan and The Band moving to Woodstock, Neil Young buying a farm in California, Paul Stookey doing his “John Henry Bosworth” routine in Maine, John Denver singing “Thank God I’m a country boy” in Aspen. We learned to cook vegetarian and make our own granola and yogurt, dreamed of building our very own geodesic domes and nightly guitar and harmonica jams passing the joint around the campfire. Dye-tie, bandanas, torn jeans with flower patches, macrame, peace signs, a broad-brimmed hat like George Harrison’s, some daisies in my girlfriend’s hair…

Arcadia.

My wife and I were a couple years into our marriage (yes, she wore a tiara of flowers) when we joined a house-church group (now I’m an atheist) that talked in awed tones about some families that were starting their own Christian commune in the country. They were actually growing their own food, chopping their own wood, plowing their own dirt, living off the land. We went with another couple for a visit.

Christian Country Utopia turned out to be three couples with small children living in the converted hayloft of a barn—family quarters separated by draperies hung on clotheslines, room heat and oven and cooktop provided by a potbelly stove in the center, lots of tie dye and bandanas and big hats and guitars and harmonicas, also a fiddle—don’t forget the fiddle. They said they had room for more but didn’t seem all that enthusiastic about it. Mostly they seemed kind of worn out, like they could use a hot shower and a laundromat. My wife and I and our friends had thought maybe we’d stay the night. We didn’t. Not enough FOMO to make us stay. Or want to go back.

My wife was a city girl—it was the better choice. Instead of heading back to the farm I became a city kid. We built a city life, raised city kids. Even then, I held onto this self-image of being one of those boys you couldn’t take the country out of. Now and then I’d go on a binge—read books like We Took to the Woods, The Egg and I, E.B. White’s essays about leaving NYC for Maine, Walden, everything Wendel Berry wrote. Once I spent a couple days at a Luddite conference at a Quaker church in southeast Ohio. One of the speakers was an Amish guy who described plowing that morning with his team of horses. I was in raptures—not that I’d ever driven a team of horses pulling a plow, it just sounded way cool. All that while building a career as a JD/MBA in management consulting and law. Go figure.

My career hit its stride when I switched from corporate, securities, mergers and acquisitions to estate planning and family business succession planning for agricultural families and their farms, ranches, and Main Street America businesses. I played my country boy card to the max while I cultivated a city boy law practice (I personally rarely met with our country clients—local people handled that).

Fast forward to today.

I said I didn’t want to leave where we were, but that’s a lie. I’m here because of an unresolved case of Goin’ up the Country. I hadn’t gotten my visions of Arcadia out of my system, and now here I am, living at the end of the world in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere not on the way to anywhere. Yes the view of the mountain range is something. Yes the air is clear. Is that enough to live on?

No.

Before we moved here my wife and I took a road trip looking for new affordable places to live. Where we ended up wasn’t on the list. It should have stayed that way. We were having an ice cream in a small town one day, watching the people and all the pickups and ag haulers and equipment rumbling by when my wife had an epiphany. “I get it,” she said, “All the stuff we think is so important, it’s not to these people. It’s not anywhere in their world.”

Not anywhere in their world. They’re not like us. We’re not like them. There’s a mountain range between us.

I’ve been out of law practice for several years (for reasons unrelated to the rural/urban thing, so I won’t go into them), but I thought hey why not, maybe I’ll fire up the estate planning practice again. It lasted exactly one client meeting, where I sat there thinking “if I have to do this for a living….”

That’s when the despondency began in earnest.

I had to find a new word for how I felt about living here that went beyond “depressed.” I settled on “despondent.” Despondence comes from a different place in your psyche. It’s deeper, thicker, heavier. It’s not about losing the struggle to be motivated and hopeful and upbeat, it’s a tangible emptiness that soaks into your whole body. Hope and courage, vibrancy and vision aren’t just gone where you can’t summon them, you don’t even want to—there’s no point in it, they don’t exist.

I looked into a new career in economic development and urban and regional design—you know, stop complaining and figure out how to turn this into the kind of place I’d like to live. I did some informational interviewing—the Dean of one design program listened to me describe where I lived. “Have you thought about moving?” she asked.

I know, I know… I’m acting urban. I need to get over myself, embrace my inner rural. Got it. Guilty as charged. But sometimes I think if I never see another pickup or hear another long-haul truck roaring down Main Street my life might be good again. That, and not having the guy with an open-carry pistol strapped on one hip and a Bowie knife on the other wishing me a “blessed day.” Then maybe I’d feel some of Aesop’s peace and security (not that it ended all that well for him).

Numbed. Shocked. Stunned. PTSD. Despondency will do that to you.

Lately I’ve been reading psychiatry books about things like death and stress and trauma. Turns out there was a lot packed into my unresolved country boy identity. I’m grateful for a chance to deepen. I’m working on a plan to come back to my senses, re-create myself.

I’m workin’ it.

And you?

I’d say think, think, and think some more, and then take some time for cakes and ale in fear, and enjoy some plenty in the midst of fear and uncertainty.

There’s a lot to be afraid of here, too.

[1] The Town Mouse and The Country Mouse – Fables of Aesop  Eliot/Jacobs Version,

[2] Library of Congress Aesop Fables (read.gov)

[3] Despite the pandemic narrative, Americans are moving at historically low rates (brookings.edu)

[4] Difference Between Rural and Urban Sociology | Compare the Difference Between Similar Terms

[5] For a long list of poll results and analysis, see Similarities and differences between urban, suburban and rural communities in America | Pew Research Center  May 22, 2018.

[6] Donald Trump and changing rural/urban voting patterns – ScienceDirect

[7] Delphi – Wikipedia. Delphi – HISTORY.

[8] Aesop – Wikipedia

[9] Back-to-the-land movement – Wikipedia

Kevin Rhodes Belief Systems and Culture, Fascism and Religion, Uncategorized

Dobbs Isn’t About Abortion

Protestors act like the overthrow of Roe v. Wade is about the law—about Constitutional rights, privacy rights, women’s rights, reproductive rights, etc. It’s not.

The Democrats and progressives have taken up the cause on that basis. They’re wrong.

The demise of Roe v. Wade isn’t about anybody’s legal rights. It’s about the Bible. And since the people thumping Bibles in the USA’s public arena these days are Christians, it’s a Christian issue.

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is about the Christian Right’s takeover of American law and culture.

That’s it. That’s the whole story.

We need to get that.

Argue all you want about laws and rights. Go ahead, occupy the outrage high ground. But do that and you miss the point entirely. The point is that the Christians have overrun the gates, gotten inside the walls, and now they’re running the government.

Just like they planned to do on Jan. 6.

Only this time they pulled it off.

That’s not just anti-Christian rhetoric, it’s what the Christians themselves think. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization supporters are celebrating because the case puts God back in charge of the U.S.—the way God always intended it to be.

If you’re going to protest and debate and argue and make your case, talk about that.

Talk about that openly and in public. Talk about it like people who have retained the ability to think might actually hear what you’re saying.

Everything else misses the central point.

To the Christian mind, Roe vs. Wade stood for the scandalous idea that pregnancy is biological. That’s not Christian. Pregnancy is not a biological issue, there’s a living soul in there—it’s a human life. So now we’ve got one human lifeoccupying space inside another human life, and pitting one against the other is wrong. They both have The Right To Life. To think otherwise is to plot murder. Murder has been against the law ever since God wrote “Thou shalt not kill” with his finger on a stone tablet and handed it to Moses. Roe put the mother’s rights over the baby’s, but God meant it when he said “Thou shalt not kill,” so Roe made God really, really mad, and he’s been punishing the U.S. ever since. And for just as long, Christians have been doing their duty to restore God’s law, which they finally achieved when their delegates on the Supreme Court adopted Dobbs. God’s law is back in charge, which is why women who get abortions are now criminals.

I swear I’m not making that up. Go back and listen and read what the Christians are saying and doing about Dobbs, and you’ll be convinced.

All of that is so disgusting that I can hardly stand to write it, and you can hardly stand to read it. But it’s what Christians think. The Christians who don’t think that way are heretics, and they know it.

I know that’s what Christians think because I was a Christian myself.

For the past five decades the Christian Right has been meticulously advancing, imposing, and enforcing their Biblical worldview on USA law, economics, and social life. The Christian Right movement began in response to Roe v. Wade. That’s a fact. Really. You can go back and trace it. Prominent evangelical luminaries such as Jerry Falwell and Francis Shaefer led a counter-revolution against what they perceived to be a decline in Bible-based social morality. Their initiative encouraged evangelical Christians to become politically active and offered popular support and funding. The initial goal was to make Biblical worldview normative. The end game was Christian Nationalism – a return to the USA’s beginnings as a “Christian nation.”

Now they’ve won their end game. And, drunk on their victory, they’re looking for more messes to clean up in the name of God. Just take a look at Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion.

Trump holding the Bible in front of St. John’s Church was the perfect iconic moment for the Christian Nationalist agenda. Pundits miss the point when they snicker about whether Trump knows what’s in the Bible. He doesn’t need to know—all he has to do is brandish the Bible, and the gesture says everything that needs to be said.

“Bible – that’s who we are. We are here to divide and conquer. We are here to create winners and losers, us and them, sheep and goats, wheat and weeds. We do as the Bible does – we separate and polarize, we advance our worldview and agenda at the expense of yours, and we are not afraid to act like the Bible’s people of God and use force if we need to. We have God on our side, but just in case we also have guns.”

Back in the day. I and my fellow Christians cheered for the Christian Right (not called that yet), prayed for them, believed in them. God forgive us, we didn’t know what we were doing. We had no clue that what we were cheering for would morph into fake truth and Christian Nationalism and believe-whatever-conspiracy-theories-you-want-and-the-more-bizarre-the-better. We didn’t see that a greedy, selfish, delusional mindset would take over the American mind, turn us to self-absorption and stupidity and the loss of community and the common good and pit us irreconcilably against each other.

Anti-Dobbs protestors think they’ve got such an airtight case that the Christian Nationalist social agenda is in open defiance of Constitutional rights such as voting, gender equality, and the separation of church and state that they don’t even need to talk about it. I mean, everybody knows that.

They need to talk about it. Everybody doesn’t know that.

That these things are an issue at all is because of a fatal flaw in the system. Our very Constitution was flawed in its creation by the Biblical Western Civilization European White Male Dominance that saturates its worldview. Racism, misogyny… its all in there. We were taught differently when we went to school, and we learned our lessons well. And now, the Christian Right, drunk on its newfound power, wants to make sure we can’t teach our children what really happened back then.

Democrats and progressives don’t talk about these things. They’re afraid to. I have never understood why. I mean, what’s the point if you can’t get to the real issues in your speeches? What’s the point of always cowering, being afraid of the hack job the media and the bigots are going to make of what you say?

You’d think we’d be sick of it and ready for something new. But no—Christianity’s new power to control the public ideological framework keeps our brains small and stupid, makes sure we never grow up, never talk about things that matter, never get past the psychological maturity and emotional intelligence of middle school.

We need to talk about things that matter.

And the Christian overthrow of our government matters.

Kevin Rhodes Belief Systems and Culture, Knowledge, Conviction, and Belief, The Long Reads, Uncategorized, Utopia/Dystopia

Subjective Objective Reality – It’s Complicated… and Complex

Objective knows.

Subjective believes.

Reality needs both.

Objective does complicated. Think organizational chart nodes, arrows, lines… linear, hierarchical, systematic, intellectual, orderly, predictable, solvable, scalable, recursive… control, rules, authority, supervision, duties, reports, obligations, pecking order… STEM, formulas, metrics, mechanics….

Subjective does complex.  Think Venn Diagram overlapping and interacting circles, shifting magnitude and color… nonlinear, intuitive, relational, emotional, unpredictable, unsolvable, idiosyncratic… dynamic emphasis, trends, fading in and out…. liberal arts, creativity, improv….

Objective + subjective = complicated, complex reality.

The way reality really is.

We don’t get much reality these days. We don’t get objective to deal with complicated, and we don’t get subjective to deal with complex. Instead, we get the worst of neither – a toxic corrosive chemical intravenous cocktail of unreality we can’t unhook, injected in ever-escalating doses to satisfy our ever-escalating addiction to it.

Take away objective input and subjective balance and what do we get?

We get septic ideologies and the excesses of the rich and famous, the celebs and sycophants, the glitz and glam, the bad boy barons behaving badly, the ratings-rule-so-we’ll-say-and-do-anything-to-make-a-bigger-buck crowd, the economic and educational elites who don’t realize that’s what they are, the whole crowd of fat cats and bikini bodies that we in our moral superiority all agree are morally despicable but we want to be just like them.

We get adrenaline and cortisol as the drug of choice, keeping us in a state of outrage powered by the outrageous — individual and collective amygdalas running full-out, stoking the rage, stabbing us with the drive to survive, revving the fight or flight mechanism, keeping the trigger finger twitchy.

We get “truthiness” and “we create our own reality” and “all news is fake news” and “do your own research” and “freedom” cutting the tether of substantiality, sending us spinning off to the Lost in Space Land of the more bizarre the better, sowing the wind of nutcase-ness and reaping the whirlwind of reality unhinged.

We get confused and threatened and hang-wringing opposition that still believes there’s good in everybody so we can’t just give up on the bastards, we need to reach out and collaborate, compromise, negotiate, and bipartisanize our way to the family photo shoot — preferably without the arsenal but I’m sure we can all agree to keep the progressive cousins out of it otherwise we won’t be America anymore, and then what would we do if we can’t tell our children upward mobility bedtime stories anymore?

That’s what you get when you lose touch.

That’s what you get when objective and subjective don’t come to dinner together anymore.

Meanwhile those of us who, like me, just have to write stuff like this are dutifully playing out the role of the nerd in middle school chemistry class who can’t keep his mouth shut and just has to make a crack about the dumb jock in back who’s going to pound him for it.

We just can’t help ourselves.

We should learn to help ourselves.

I mean, Covid is over, right? I mean, it is isn’t it? So that means it’s time for capitalism to lead the way again – I mean, it will, won’t it? So how about the nerds just agree to shut up? If we’re unlucky enough to ever get noticed, all we get for a reward is another pounding.

You’d think we’d learn.

We need to learn.

We need help.

We need reality.

Reality is complicated – we need to figure it out and put institutions and organizations and models and checks and balances in place to control it and then be accountable for what we do and think and say and for God’s sake check the damned lies at the door. We need people like that, and we need to listen to them.

Reality is complex – we need people who aren’t stuck to agendas or caught in nostalgic backwaters or revelations of the illuminati but who can instead improvise and innovate and manage for the sake of the rest of us until we’re assembled into a safe grouping of common welfare… and check the damned idealism at the door. We need to listen to them, too.

Is there anybody like that out there anymore? And if we met one, how would we know?

Simple rule:  My guess is that if we ever met one, they would be somebody you’d like. You’d be sitting there maskless sipping your espresso and thinking this is someone I could hang with – just be around soaking in the confident vision and self-respect that comes from accessing both sides of the brain. This is someone who can think and feel. Someone who can dissect and integrate. Someone who’s safe to be with, so I don’t have to be so guarded, always watching what I say. Probably someone who is over the need to rant every now and then… but maybe not entirely. Probably they would admit to the label “progressive” even though it gets them kicked out of the family photo and the bedtime stories, and even though they realize that Bernie’s too old and AOC and the Squad… I mean, no offense, but after all they are… I mean, young and… um, I mean, you know… not white.

[Sigh]

It’s tough to find friends these days.

We need friends – reality friends. We need reality. We need objectivity and subjectivity to help us create and understand, channel and guide, articulate and empathize our way through life, through tricky times and troubled waters.

Like that’s going to happen.

Like it will – in time.

Like we hope it’s before the Dystopian Reality Show we’re living in actually stops being reality TV — which everyone knows isn’t reality – and actually becomes reality.

Or something like that.

Never mind. I guess I lost the thought.

Something about reality.

For more:

Complex versus complicated problems (fastcompany.com)

Smart Leaders Know the Difference Between Complex and Complicated. Do You? | Inc.com

JohnKamensky.pdf (businessofgovernment.org)

Amazon.com: It’s Not Complicated: The Art and Science of Complexity in Business (Rotman-Utp Publishing): 9781442644878: Nason, Rick: Books

Kevin Rhodes Atheism, Knowledge, Conviction, and Belief, Narratives of Self, Purpose, and Meaning, Religion, The Long Reads, Uncategorized

Subjective Vision, Objective Evaluation

Go ahead – believe, dream, envision, get inspired, think big.

But then evaluate. Stop believing and take an objective look at what it’s actually going to take for your Big Idea to happen. Or if you already quit your day job, take the time for a good, hard, long, skeptical look at what’s actually happening. It might not be too late to grovel your way back.

I wish I’d done that. I never got out of the subjective phase – never achieved enough escape velocity to get free of belief. I was an elite believer – a professional’s professional. I know belief like a worthy foe — all its wily, fraudulent snares.

Beware the evaluation that never gets out of belief. Belief validates itself, admits no outside counsel. Belief doesn’t want data, doesn’t need to make a budget or do market research. Belief believes – that’s its only job, and it’s the best at it. If you want evaluation you’ll have to look elsewhere. Objective assessment –- rational thought, science — thrives on doubt. It begins with the assumption that whatever it has concluded is wrong and begs you to prove it. Not so with belief. Belief has a zero tolerance policy on doubt. To doubt is to not believe, by definition. Belief doesn’t want you to know, it wants you to… well, um, believe.

Belief has no ethics, subscribes to no code of conduct. It isn’t accountable, doesn’t answer to independent, unbiased assessment. It’s free to do what it likes.

Belief don’t need no stinking facts.

In the world of belief, there’s no such thing as “independent and unbiased.” Belief rewards its own, destroys its dissenters. The polarities of belief and knowledge repel each other — an attempted interaction between a rationalist and a believer never ends well. Belief has too much at stake – it must prevail or there’s no belief anymore – doubt will wipe it out. With belief there’s no recognizing the delegate from the opposite faction. Nobody but us, no case but ours. Fact-checkers? We’re not listening la la la la. Religious doctrine? Stay out of it, we know what’s true and you don’t. Clergy or politician misbehavior, moral lapses, illegalities? Boys will be boys — we’ll give ‘em a mulligan. Batshit conspiracy theories? Have at it – the more bizarre the better. Fake news? “Do your own research”? “Freedom”? Go for it – it’s your right.

I know these things because I’ve lived on both sides. I spent over two decades as an evangelical fundamentalist cultist Christian believer. When I first started drifting out, I became a self-helper, which turned out to be the exact same religion. Both were about belief. There was no reality other than what you believed. You took flight and never touched down. Nobody called you to account, they just cheered you on, chanted more, more, more, higher, higher, higher.

Nobody ever heard of Icarus.

Christianity claimed to be accountable to its source code the Bible, but that was a sham. I was a Protestant – the religion Martin Luther founded with his sola scriptura doctrine – everybody can and should and must read the Bible for what it says to them, and the religious authorities can keep their mitts off your personal revelation. That makes Protestantism unaccountable by definition. It’s up to you. Make it say what you want. No wonder there are so many fundie whack jobs out there.

I was one of them. I ought to know.

Fortunately, I haven’t ridden the pendulum to the other side, haven’t transferred the focus of my belief to rationalism or objectivity or any other legacy of the “Age of Enlightenment.” (Spare me! Aren’t we being a little pretentious with our title?) Rationalism’s most ardent advocates are just another kind of believer. Same with a lot of atheists, who are more obnoxiously evangelistic than we were back in the day. I’m an atheist myself, but I figured out early that I wasn’t going to make it a substitute religion.

Belief of any kind is a shut-down when it comes to evaluation. It’s incapable of objectivity. Evaluation is not its job. What’s it good for? Shooting our brains full of dopamine, which they love. Dopamine inspires us, gets us moving. Gives us dreams and visions. Makes us feel hopeful. Empowers us with a sense of meaning and purpose. Stuff like that. It’s hard to argue against a dopamine high. People love that shit. Okay, do it if you need to. Just don’t do what I did all those years – all those wasteful, addicted, self-sabotaging dopamine high years, all those years of following my believing dreams from one flameout to another.

When you ask, “How’s this going to work?” or “How’s this going?” don’t listen to belief’s opinion. If your friends share your beliefs, welcome and love them, but all of you need a shot of perspective. You won’t get it from somebody who’s super-critical and cynical either, because those are signals that you’re probably dealing with somebody who’s operating with the weakest and most deceptive form of thinking, which is belief masquerading as rationality.

No, instead, find people who don’t care — people who don’t need things to go one way or the other in order to convince themselves they are valid or alive. It’s okay if they think your ideas are cool, big, inspiring, whatever… but ultimately you don’t want them invested in whether your dreams and visions play out. Find people that if you crash and burn they might just turn and look away from the wreckage and leave you there to deal. If you’re going to listen to people, listen to people like that. They’re your friends – your real friends.

Same with facts and data and trends – they might be leaning in your direction, but they’re only numbers. Sit alone in a dark theater and repeat to yourself, “they’re only numbers, they’re only statistics” until you’re convinced, and then take another look at them. Beware your own perverse ability to make them speak your language, make them love you. If they fawn all over your idea, push them away. They’ll break your heart one day. It’s not worth the thrill in the meantime.

Detachment. That’s what you want. People who respect you (they have to respect you, or get out of there fast) but don’t need to like you or need you to like them. Inspect yourself, the people, and the data like you’re checking for tics, and if you find more than one, run screaming from the room. Scour speeches and articles and analyses for biases and assumptions and calculate how much they’re warping the results and conclusions. Calculate the naysayer’s score, then round it up – way up.

Go ahead and tell your friends and family. Be grateful for their support. They’re here for you. That counts. They’ll probably think you’re nuts – not a bad thing. They might be swayed by your belief. That’s nice. But unless they’re in it – whatever it is — with you, not just for you, don’t ask for more. You’d be better off if you find out what your detractors think, and then shut them up. They won’t be convinced by your belief. They’ll want RealThink. They’ll give you a reality check. That’s what you want.

Especially don’t give any weight to idea people. Idea people go through life deflecting – a likeability habit which makes it seem like they’re engaging, but they’re not. Ideas are everywhere and always and inexhaustible – so plentiful and abundant that they’re worthless. What matters are ideas of substance and commitment — the ones where somebody backs them with action and money and whatever else they can, and only then do they say “I like your idea.”

Lastly, be cautious about the pivot. If you’re pivoting from one unsubstantiated belief to another, stop it.

Just stop it.

Now.

If you’re pivoting because you originally relied on data and research and information that maybe was good once but now things have changed and it’s a whole new world out there… then, yeah, go ahead and pivot. Just pivot into something with substance, not another inspirational belief dream wouldn’t-this-be-cool vision.

So follow your heart. Be a subjective visionary. Go for it. Make your dreams come true.

But then figure out how to deliver. Be an objective evaluator. What’s it going to take, what’s it going to cost? What’s it going to look like when you get there, and how will you know? What do you need to know that you don’t? How are you going to find out what you need to know that don’t know already – especially the stuff you don’t even know that you need to know it?

And when in doubt, sit down and wait until the dopamine high passes off. Better have the inspirational hangover first, before you embarrass and impoverish yourself again.

I ought to know. I made a life of it. Now I’m a recovered beliefaholic. I’m like a nonsmoker who used to do three packs a day – the most obnoxious kind of no-tolerance don’t-tempt-me skeptic. I’m for you, but I would spare you if I could.

But I probably can’t. You like the dope too much.

See you at our next meeting. Tuesday night. Methodist church basement.

Kevin Rhodes Narratives of Self, Purpose, and Meaning, The Long Reads, Uncategorized

We Didn’t See it Coming

And now that it has, we don’t know what to do.

Of course we don’t know what to do. We’ve never been here before, we’ve never done this, we don’t know anybody who has, so how should we know what to do?

We didn’t see it coming. We weren’t prepared. Nobody told us. Nobody told us things really could melt down, that you can really get to a place where the center doesn’t hold. We didn’t know these things could really happen.

But then they did, and here we are. Oh yeah, we heard, we read about them. We entertained ourselves with them. But the real thing? No. Not here, not now, not us. Never us. But now it’s us, and we’re clueless.

All our institutions, all the systems, the programs, the back up plans, all the Plan B’s and contingency plans and escape routes, all the provisions laid up, all the people we thought we could trust, the people in charge, the people who should know, all the paid grownups who take care of boring stuff like how they keep the lights turned on and why the food keeps coming – they all checked out early and now they’re gone where we can’t find them.

They didn’t know either. They just kept using all the same old jargon, reciting the same old lines, pretending things were still the way they used to be, how things used to work — either that or they just made shit up that everybody with any brains knew was shit but people flocked to it anyway, I mean what else was there? They fed the fire instead of putting it out, fed it with the same old burned-out charcoal chunks of what used to be a fire but now is just ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

The other adults – the ones who don’t do stuff, they just explain it, they were frozen. They knew too much, they tried to tell us how things work and what was going to happen if we didn’t so something about it, but nobody listened, nobody thought they were any good for anything. Well, half of us thought so anyway. Half of us thought they had nothing to offer, while the other half thought they were the only ones who could save us, but the first half was louder and more into believing things than knowing things, which is easier because doing your own research means filling up with more fantasy to believe so you can keep faking your way through life.

Until you can’t anymore.

And now, while that half keeps faking it and making shit up and trying to gut the life and substance out of everything, the half that has known all along, has seen it coming, has actually done the research, that half is also stuck in all the ways things used to be, so they keep trotting out all the old ways like decency and discourse, listening and knowing, compromising and collaborating – nice sounding stuff that apparently used to work, but now when they talk about it they sound like a bunch of old codgers trying to assure us the everything is alright, just give it time, things will work out, no need to fear, no cause for panic. They do that so we will stay calm, but we see through them, we know better, we feel what’s going down and we know that our feelings don’t lie.

It’s like everybody who’s talking is lying – one half because they actually believe their own lies and the other half because they’re so blind and stuck and unoriginal that they don’t realize reaching back to the times when things weren’t like this is effectively telling lies about the way things are now.

So now here we are – chaos, crash, crisis… disintegration, destruction, disorder… ruin, rubble, randomness… the poetic thesaurus for how to say that everything has fallen apart and my god this was never supposed to happen, nobody thought it ever would, we thought we could hold things together but we couldn’t and now we can’t so look at it — look at this mess of our own making and it’s our fault because we never thought we would have to clean it up, look at this smoking husk of everything we thought belonged to us but it turns out somebody else had the right to repossess it.

So how does it feel?

The wheels came off. We ran off the rails. Things came loose, everything fell apart. The bottom fell out. The top blew off. The walls caved in. Things went sideways. We drove off a cliff. We hit bottom. We’re in a tailspin. We’re going down. It’s the perfect storm, the perfect flood, the perfect earthquake, tidal wave, tsunami. We’re lost in space, out at sea, out in left field. We lost our bearings. Our foundations shook. Our sea anchor broke loose. We drifted off. We’re sunk. We’re lost. We’re screwed. We’re dizzy, disoriented. We went from unplanned, unpredicted, and unforeseen to unimaginable, uncontrollable, and unrecognizable. There’s that saying about the inmates in charge of the asylum. Now they are. The nut cases’ nutty ideas have gone mainstream. Reality has inverted, flip-flopped, turned inside out. What is, isn’t anymore. What was, will never be again. The first shall be last and the last shall be first.

That’s how it feels.

Only worse.

Everything is always worse. The news is always bad. It’s always something. Just when we think it can’t get any worse it gets worse. We go from bad to worse to worst to so-off-the-charts-worst there isn’t a category for it. There’s never a break, never any let up.

Yeah, I get it. Things have been bad before – that’s the lesson of history and blah blah blah. We’re supposed to buck up, tough it out, stay the course, keep our chin up, quit being so negative, keep up a positive mental attitude, stop whining, stop feeling sorry for ourselves, cut with the entitlement already.

Yeah right. Like any of that’s actually going to help when you can’t think straight, can’t hold a coherent useful thought. Maybe this has happened before, but it’s never happened to us, never happened now.

We didn’t see it coming.

I didn’t see it coming.

And now that it has, I don’t know what to do. Of course I don’t know what to do. I’ve never been here before, I’ve never done this, I don’t know anybody who has. So how should I know what to do? How should I have known what this would be like?