EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 TRIBAL INSTINCTS

We wonder what is happening to America. Civility as we once knew it has not only disappeared in politics, but it is now considered a weakness.

If one accepts the idea currently circulated among scientists and academics that evolutionary psychology is the main determinant of our actions, (and I know what a hard intellectual pill this is to swallow) the answer becomes clearer.

Some postulate that what we call a movement toward morality is not a spiritual movement, but rather a long process of socio-economic tradeoffs.

• We won’t raid your village if you don’t raid ours.
• I won’t try to kill you if you won’t try to kill me.
• We will trade goods with you for mutual gain.
• We will agree to use artificial objects, i.e., money for exchange instead of direct and laborious bartering.
• We will agree to live in peaceful harmony in cities to facilitate life’s needs and make life easier.
• Etc.

Accepting that, what we now see is simply a reversion to a more primitive, tribal state of evolution, spurred by fake news outlets and social media.

• Danger is everywhere.
• We must band together as a tribe for survival.
• The Tribe is the most sacred of all entities.
• We must destroy all who threaten the tribe.
• We must forget personal peace and pleasure to protect the tribe.
• We will develop a spiritual belief system to control large populations withing the tribe.
• Our leaders must offer strength, not goodness.

Kind of begins to make sense, doesn’t it?

EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 FATHER'S DAY

Each year on this day I get the feeling that I must be the only person on Facebook that didn’t have a perfect father. Oh, mine wasn’t imperfect, his personal radar simply picked up a few blips from time to time. Those made him more interesting than sinister, except when it came to punishment for my myriad transgressions.

Perhaps his most salient characteristic was that he worked. My Sainted Mother emphasized it once when I mentioned a girl with whom I thought for sure I was in love. “Love,” she said. “Let me tell you about love. When I married your daddy, I wasn’t in love. I married him because we all knew the von Tungelns worked. And I knew I would never have to go hungry again. His family didn’t even go hungry during the depression. Then we sharecropped together, butchered hogs together, and bought this store together. After a while, I woke up one morning and realized I worshipped the ground he walked on.”

That thought echoed back to me not long ago when I asked my bride of over 50 years why she married me. “Good looks? Nice personality? Intelligence? Wit?”

“You had a J-O-B,” she said. “That’s important around here.”

It was important in our house. That little country grocery store was open six days a week from before daylight until late evening. In the slow part of the day, my daddy would butcher meat for the store, or cut wood to be sold to folks for heating their homes. During one long period he spent after hours adding two rooms to our house which, incidentally, was attached to the store.

A fond memory involves the annual four-day vacation the family took to the beaches at Florida or Texas. It was on one of those that I learned to read a map. Daddy showed me how. I considered it a minor miracle that one could follow those little lines and know what city was coming up next. I don’t guess the kids today will ever experience that miracle. Too bad.

I guess it was the reputation he and Sainted Mother bestowed on the family that I remember best. On a couple of occasions I managed to find myself under the questioning eye of a police officer who would have been delighted to arrest a careless teenager. Each time I was scolded and ordered home when I told them my name.

Things like that bring back memories as does a yellowed newspaper article I keep in a safe deposit box. It contains a piece written in our hometown newspaper after a deadly tornado tore through our area south of Pine Bluff in 1947. It tells how my father gave away things in our store to anyone who needed them after the damage, the righteousness bankrupting the little business. Another piece, a smaller one, reports how the little town of Lonsdale, Arkansas collected $45 and sent it to us after reading the first article. That would be almost $1,500 today.

So I don’t mind that he kept a cow for most of his life that he fed every night after the store closed or that he did so not for love of cattle but for love of the nightly nip of the Old Yellowstone he kept hidden in the hay.

Life’s radar needs a blip each day like Daddy needed that nip.

EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 POLICE OFFICERS

I’ve always gotten on well with police officers. Let me rephrase that, some of my best friends served as police officers. When I read or hear of the highly publicized malpractices of a few of the nearly three-quarters of a million law enforcement officers in our country, I think of a man I knew in a city not far from where I live.

He was a paragon of virtue. Just ask some of those who remember him. A realtor, banker, insurance agent, entrepreneur, and winner of every “man of year” award his city offered, he never harmed a soul. A real person, he is also the living representative of the same man in every city in which I’ve ever worked. The church house walls bulged at his funeral.

One of his big sources of income was selling homes to people who couldn’t afford a mortgage. He sold them “on a contract” which means they built up no equity unless the loan was paid in full. Folks in town told about the poor fellow, almost always African American, who had faithfully paid his monthly installment for years before missing a month due to a family hardship. Next day he would find his home being cleared to make way for the next family getting it “on contract.”

The newspapers never reported on that.

“Yes, as through this world I've wandered

I've seen lots of funny men

Some will rob you with a six-gun

And some with a fountain pen

And as through your life you travel

Yes, as through your life you roam

You won't never see an outlaw

Drive a family from their home.”

-          - Woody Guthrie “Pretty Boy Floyd”

TODAY'S EPIPHANY

 LAWYERS

 I’ve always gotten on well with attorneys. I admire them for their logic and willingness to see that all, not just the favored, receive a fair trial. Do some push the limits? Sure. But some physicians prescribe antibiotics for viruses. Some engineers designed the crematoria at Auschwitz. Heck, some urban planners even promote bike paths when kids are starving in the Mississippi River Delta.

Oh, and part of my feelings for attorneys are mercenary. They always made sure I got paid for expert testimony. Mostly my feelings stem from admiration for their knowledge. I might have followed the law, but I thought all attorneys had to do what Perry Mason did. That image shied me away. The thought of standing and speaking in public was more terrifying to me than thoughts of snakes, vampires, sci-fi monsters, or meeting a Catholic nun in the dark.

One of my best friends is an attorney. We jogged many a morning together and shared thoughts. He is a Harvard Law School grad, so unlike the venom-spewing Ted Cruz or Tom Cotton that they might be from different planets. I learned logic, dedication to the law, and concepts of the advocacy system of jurisprudence from him.

Imagine then, my dismay at the condition of the current United States Supreme Court. I always imagined it as a pinnacle of dedication, Knowledge, fairness, and legal righteousness. Along came the current majority.  Now I feel as I might have, as a youth, to find that Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Red Ryder, Tex Ritter, Lash Larue, and Hopalong Cassidy, were really Nazi spies.

TODAY'S EPIPHANY

 CHOICES

It’s difficult to choose one side unconditionally these days. I’ve always leaned left, but don’t always subscribe to the silliness. Yes, no offense, but there are some silly things going on ‘die äußerste Linke,” way over yonder. This “pronoun crap” in my opinion, is silly. This “I don’t feel safe hearing an opinion I disagree with” is silly. This stopping traffic while innocent people are trying to get to work, to the hospital, or home to their children is beyond silly.

Every sports coach knows that one never makes a statement that the opposing coach will tack to the locker room walls to motivate players. Think how many votes Donald Trump received just from “defund the police.”

But, to allegorize something Sigmund Freud probably never said but got stuck with, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

Silliness is just silliness. Unproductive actions are just unproductive actions. Extreme “wokeism” is just extreme wokeism. People don't normally die from them.

Making a 12-year-old girl give birth to a rapist’s sperm residue is more than silliness.

Attacking the police guarding the United State Capitol is more than just silliness.

Defunding programs that feed the poor is more than just silliness.

Persecuting someone because of their genetic wiring for sex is more than just silliness.

Decisions stem from points along a spectrum of reality. At one end are rainbow flags. At the other are crematorium ovens.

A New Epiphany

 PASSWORDS

Yesterday’s Epiphany: It can’t be the economy. Most folks are doing well enough, and many are doing quite well. The job I first went to work for earning $400 per month now starts at around $65,000 per year. No, I just think there’s an uneasy feeling pervading America, a sense that something is wrong, and disaster is imminent.

As the Nazis rose to power, there had been major hard times in Germany: inflation, stagnation, poverty, and even starvation. They felt Hitler had led, and would continue to lead, the country out of the mess.

In America today, they don’t have a past crisis to build upon. But wait, what if they could convince people that there are, indeed, hard times upon us and worse times to come? Then they could march out a charlatan who only had to babble about blaming others and making things better. A mindset built on lies is as firm as one built on truth. People are malleable.

Take the Baby Boomers for example. (I’m not technically one. I was a “don’t draft me” baby but the BBs accept me.) Now what upsets me and my cohort?

Passwords.

Yes, passwords. I’m suffering a primal despair over them. I’ve suffered from demands for them for years and I’m even running out of ideas. I must even furnish one to pay a bill when I would rejoice at the thought of a hacker paying it for me.

So, I hate passwords and suffer a love-hate relationship with modern technology.

Passwords. Damn them.

I don’t, though, blame Joe Biden for them.

But wait.

Say I watched Fox “news” for seven or eight hours per day. And what if that deplorable institution used the time to pound it into me that Joe Biden invented and promotes, even mandates, passwords.

Soon, I’d be speaking neo-German with the rest of The Cult.

An Alarming Epiphany

 AN ALARMING EPIPHANY

After working my way through Steven Plinker’s “Blank Slate” and following his recommendation to “The Nurture Assumption” by Judith Rich Harris, I’ve come to the unsettling conclusion that our actions depend, for the most part, on evolutionary psychology. Exhaustive research finds no demonstrable impact by the home. It explains so much, like how the military can turn average young people into raging warriors with a few weeks of manipulation. More alarmingly, it explains why people I once knew as caring, compassionate, and thoughtful individuals now embrace a culture of hatred, violence, and cult obedience.

We don’t have to take people forward, just help them step backwards toward the evolutionary psychology of tribalism, xenophobia, and violence. Going back is a much easier task than going forward. What we call moral improvement or the advance of civilization consists of difficult and slippery reciprocal agreements:

• We won’t attack your village if you won’t attack ours.
• We'll leave your property alone if you leave ours alone.
• We won't try to kill you if you don't try to kill us.

We achieve harmony not through some quest for righteousness but through actions that move us away from our primitive nature and toward a stable environment. Unsettling, but enlightening.