I have a couple of thoughts that revolve around a story -- a true story that happened to me yesterday (as I write, of course). So I have to tell the story first.
I spent a lot of my life in Michigan, both the upper and lower peninusulas. Winter weather may not be all that pleasant, but I'm used to it and I have learned a lot of winter-weather survival skills. One of those is to have a car with a good heater. I had that yesterday.
Because the place where I work has a 4-10 schedule and Friday is not a normal work day, and because both Christmas Eve and Christmas fall outside the normal work schedule, we're getting the 22nd and 23rd off. So I planned to use the time for some last-minute shopping, etc. First item on the agenda called for me to return a lavatory faucet and drain to a home-improvement warehouse in Hot Springs. Since there's an office-supply superstore next door, and my wife had been on the chain's site that morning and located a scanner she'd like, I decided to stop there and see what they had.
After some discussion with the salesman I selected an Epson 4180 and started home. When I got home I discovered it was broken. I took it back. I'd taken the last one they had. They might get another on the "next truck," but I decided, without prejudice to them, that I had time to go to Little Rock and pick from a better selection.
Now you have to understand that the forecast called for bad weather. I didn't worry much because I believed that Arkansas drivers posed the greatest hazard to my safety in such a situation.
Let me pause here to vent my spleen about Arkansas highway planning. Their planning sessions must go something like this:
"For the past 15 years we've had enough traffic on that stretch of highway to warrant three lanes in each direction." "Then the thing to do is to start a five-year construction project to widen that road to three lanes." "Good!"Getting through Hot Springs in good weather can do much to develop the virtue of patience. Of course if you're not interested in that it can have other less pleasant effects.... Almost nowhere in Arkansas are the roads adequate to handle the amount of traffic that seeks to use them. By the time roads are built or improved they're 20 years out of date.
But I did get through Hot Springs. Driving up 70 toward Benton became another patience-developing exercise because it didn't take long for me to catch up to Arkansans who at least had the sense to know that with their poor winter driving skills they'd better go slow. Such weather normally turns me from the slowest driver on the road to the fastest. And I've SLOWED DOWN!
About five miles out of town we drove past a serious accident. I saw one small car with the driver's-side doors smashed in by a foot or more. Serious injuries almost certainly resulted. A few miles further on I saw a small red car in the ditch on my side. A woman stood outside the car talking on a cell phone. I stopped to see if I could offer any assistance. So did a pickup-load of Hispanic guys. They were all cheerful and willing to help, but the woman had already arranged a tow and didn't seem to want us hanging around, so we left. I did see that she had been driving toward Hot Springs and had slid across the oncoming traffic lane. She was lucky.
She said there was another accident between us and I-30. She was right. In this one a pickup had completely lost one wheel.
Things got a little better on I-30, simply because I could join the slightly more confident Arkansans in the left lane and not dawdle quite so badly. I began to think I'd picked a good time to go shopping in Little Rock because the weather might have discouraged people from going to the stores. That turned out true. At the store I'd selected in Little Rock I got a slightly cheaper Epson 2580 scanner. It has an automatic filmstrip loader which I've already tried and found very useful.
On the way north on I-430 I'd seen the southbound lanes full of slow-moving traffic. Everyone wanted to get out of town. As a result I decided not to try to get back home on the interstates. My wife had shown me a back way from West Little Rock to Benton which I determined to use. But I didn't want to get low on gas, and the Sam's Club gas station right across the street made sense to me.
When I saw that the parking lot had few cars in it I decided to take advantage of the situation. I found the store nearly deserted, and everyone inside friendly, even the normally harried staff. Some were excited about the weather because it likely meant a white Chrismas. (They say central Arkansas gets one of those on average every 14 years.)
Thus set I started west on Chenal Parkway. But I quickly discovered hills were going to be a problem. Not because I couldn't drive up and down them safely, but because many other drivers couldn't. I finally got past one major jam and continued. I had to keep stopping because the very wet snow falling would turn to ice on the wipers.
I called my wife on the cell phone for instructions on how to navigate the road in question. She wasn't even sure where I was and wasn't willing to go looking for our Arkansas atlas (she wouldn't have found it anyway). So when I got to a small gas station where I stopped again to clear the wipers I went in to be sure I was going in the right direction.
The people inside were a little reluctant to direct me to the shortest route becasue of "the hill." But when I indicated that I had driven for years in Michigan they believed I'd not have trouble. And I didn't. But I did wait about a half hour for someone with a monster pickup to winch a small truck out of a ditch. During that time I ran up and down to road to see what was happening and talked to people in several vehicles. Everyone's mood seemed upbeat and friendly given the frustrating situation. Even those past the pull-me-out drama were waiting for people to make it on up the hill.
But once the two trucks cleared the road everyone moved on. It took over three hours, but I did get home safely and without any additional dents in the car.
That's the story, now here's the thoughts. Why would normally courteous but busy and distracted people become so much nicer under such adversity? Why wouldn't the stress make them less pleasant? In California when the traffic gets bad they pull out weapons. Here's what I think.
Most California and other large-city traffic problems are of entirely human origin. We have a strong belief that problems caused by humans could be prevented by humans, and we resent those humans who have caused problems by not attending to their duties, or by their arrogant disregard of the effects of their actions on others. And we often generalize this resentment to nearly everyone we contact.
In yesterday's situation, however, the problems were primarily beyond our control. Whether you believe in God, or in "Mother Earth/Nature" or fate or whatever, the weather is essentially beyond human control. With this sense of helplessness in place we are poised to commiserate with other humans who share our plight.
That approach characterized our response immediately after 9-11-2001. We felt powerless against people who would attack without warning and by a means so nearly impossible to defend against or prevent. We felt a strong bond of national unity and common purpose.
But then something happened, something terrible. Someone came around and told us we WEREN'T helpless. They said we COULD defeat these people and encouraged us to enter a "war." They told us this war wouldn't look or act like any war we or our fathers had ever encountered. We faced a poorly-defined enemy with no single base of operations, no traditional command and control structure to defeat, and no one we could use to enforce a cease fire through a formal surrender.
They introduced a new kind of "defense;" a sort of "attack first and hope nobody asks questions later" approach. And so we sent our sons and daughters, husbands and wives, mothers and fathers across the ocean to die fighting against people who had nothing to do with the original NYDC attacks. I speak of both the attack launched in October of 2001 and the attack launched in April of 2003. To this day few people with significant involvement in 9-11 have been killed or captured other than the martyrs themselves.
As for exacting revenge against those who funded and supported the attackers we've done nothing significant. That's because we're one of the largest funders and supporters of those who attacked us. What happened in the late summer of '01 resulted from our single-minded, ignore-all-other-issues, foreign policy of the cold war era. We have replaced that failed foreign policy with an even more narrowly-focused ideologically-driven policy that is bound to lead to even more vicious deadly attacks in the future.
The result for society in general has been just what my theory would postulate. Our political discourse has turned divisive and bitter, with a level of hatred involved way beyond that which existed in years when we hadn't developed such extensive "polite" structrues to hide our true animosities. The religious right found a home-based minority on which they could vent their frustration and rage. Overpaid, underdisciplined players charged into the stands to respond to anger directed at them by the fans who had to pay their exhorbitant salaries. I could go on and on.
Of all people, Evangelical Christians ought to recognize the hand of God in what happened that September morning. And before you tell me God wouldn't do such a thing let me agree with you. God's hand didn't do it, but God's hand DID guide what happened to reduce casualties. God sent this plague upon us for a purpose. When we attempt to solve the problem in our own power we rob God of the opportunity to do for this country the good he must certainly have had in mind when he allowed those attacks.
The golden moment has passed. God knocked on the door and we ran away to open a different door. Let's just hope he isn't done with us. Let's hope some other terrible thing happens to us and that we respond with a recognition of our powerlessness before God and even before Satan. God defeated Satan, let's leave the fighting to him.
While I'm on the topic of arrogant Christianity, let me address this season in a different way. Many Christians are crying loud and long about the attempts of "them" (meaning the liberal, godless conspiracy to wipe Christianity from the nation) to remove all elements of Christianity from Christmas.
This stand is hypocritical and ill-informed. If, as the Evangelicals claim, the pagans of this country are trying to take Christmas away from the Christians, they are only taking back what belongs to them. Christmas does NOT have its origins in celebrations of the birth of Christ. Instead, Christians applied the story to an existing pagan holiday to smooth the transition from paganism to Christianity. (This became necessary when Christians decided God wanted them to force other people to become "Christian.")
The Evangelical stand is hypocritical because Christians have had decades to oppose the hijacking of the holiday for commercial purposes and have largely failed to do so. Instead they let the sellers and money-changers invade what they claimed to be sacred territory, often with the consent and blessing of the church.
Some are tempted to laud the effects of the season on the economy. "Retailers need this season," they say, "in order to make a profit." The appearance of the anti-biblical "P" word in that sentence should have been a warning. But let's step back and look with unbiased eye on what actually happens and see if it is all that good.
Using a single season, often less than a sixth of the year, to generate the larger share of your business makes your business seasonal. But that doesn't affect just your own employees. Retailers rarely order in January for merchandise to sell in November and December. So the manufacturers' business cycles also fluctuate. How do businesses handle fluctuating demands for labor? Don't make me spell this out. You should be acutely aware that the workers themselves bear the brunt of the pain generated by fluctuating demand for their services.
But there's another effect both macro- and micro-economic that ought to be anathema to every true conservative. It's not polite to give as a gift something the recipient really needs. What's romantic about underwear for Christmas (unless it's scanty stuff for a spouse, and that's not very practical)? What usually ends up happening is that we give people gifts they like but that they wouldn't spend their own money on. If you stop there that sounds very nice. But wait; there's more. That person is then expected to reciprocate and buy you something you like but that you wouldn't spend your own money on.
The end result is that both of you have spent money you wouldn't otherwise have spent and received items you couldn't justify if you had bought them with your "own" money. And thus instead of saving we go deeper in debt. That is NOT good for our economy. It also means that in order to keep up with the economic demands of our lifestyle we have to work longer hours and endure more restrictive employer regulation.
Now we do need a holiday to break the gloom of the winter season. But maybe we could move it so that it breaks the season up more evenly. Maybe a holiday in late January or early February. And let's tell the retailers that the first one to attempt to use the holiday for commercial purposes will be taken out and hanged a week before the idea comes to his mind! Then we could all, without regard to religion or economic standing, enjoy a holiday designed to meet human rather than business needs.