Good Prices...

...some assembly required.

Me again. I realize it’s been a while.

Due to various personal factors, I find myself simultaneously in the curious position of having little to say and an irrational need to say it anyway. Even now peering at this screen, I’m not sure I can conceive an integrated story. Would anyone object if I veered away from my usual script and ad-libbed a few loosely connected observations (I hope not, because here they come anyway 😉)?

I want to apologize in advance: This is not a polished piece. I hope in any case that an alert reader out there might find a few ideas worthy of consideration. If even one manages to do so, it justifies my effort such as it is.

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In no special order:

(1) We’re starting into our second year of living dangerously (and yes, I shamelessly borrowed that expression from a 1982 movie title and an earlier novel. I think it fits better here than it did then). There will be other such years to follow. I offer nothing in terms of hopes or solutions, but you don’t have to be Heather Cox Richardson to see that we’re passengers on the Titanic in the North Atlantic. Worse yet, our demented captain wants to hit icebergs 🥴!

(2) The discrepancy between the torrential gnashing of teeth and rending of garments in our commentariat class (here in Substack and elsewhere), and the stolid complacency of the broader public is striking. Nobody dares mention it out-loud out there 🤫. It’s nearly all anyone talks about in here 🤯.

I don’t often attend my hometown church of (literally) seventy years anymore, but we watch it online almost every Sunday morning. It’s a source of renewal to us in good times and bad, and a valued connection to our hometown community. But in most substantive respects, I could hardly tell today’s services from those of 1955 (We invaded Venezuela yesterday, didn’t we !?). Do I find that comforting? Baffling? Both? We stand side-by-side, and gaze upon completely different worlds.

(3) It’s objectively true that little has changed in our personal lives since 2024: The cost-of-living is higher, but not (so far) unbearably so. We’re retired and our floodwalls appear to be holding at this point. The stock market is (so far) doing well. We have health issues, but we don’t blame anyone else for that. Life appears to flow along at more-or-less its usual pace. At our ages, we’ll probably make it out of here without seeing any enormous personal differences…

…but the persistent unease that appears to be lingering mostly silently everywhere around us is not only a narrow question of direct anecdotal experience. It comes to us thru our TV sets and online experiences, and it subtly permeates all of our public interactions. It’s impossible to sustain any confidence in the future, and it’s exhausting to continually await the inevitable next car-wreck.

(4) We have a false cartoon archetype of strength in America (see Hegseth) but what happened to character 🤔? Both are important, but we’ll see later that character matters more. If we get another chance to learn that lesson, it will most likely be the hard way and too late to matter. It may be already too late. I hope not.

(5) We’ve been fortunate throughout our history in somehow finding the person to meet the moment at times of crisis. I’ve recently revisited the Ken Burns PBS series on “The American Revolution” and “The Civil War”.

Without the exact personage of George Washington in the right place at the right time, we would not have won the Revolution. The totality of his character not only carried the day in war against great odds and thru powerful reversals but gave us a chance to move forward to a new democratic society in peace when that was in no sense a preordained result.

You can make the same claim for Abraham Lincoln. His forceful defense (literally to death itself) of a unified America at all costs (at a time when less drastic solutions were possible and even seen as practical by many ‘reasonable’ authorities) gave us an America that would eventually stretch from coast-to-coast as one nation. It was his unique character above all that allowed him to swim against the prevailing tides, withstand many failures, and save the union.

Winston Churchill was only half 😉 American but who can doubt that he played that indispensable part in WW2 and saved humanity as we’ve known it in the process.

Crisis both reveals character and molds character. Who is that leader today? We know who it isn’t, don’t we?

(6) I’ll close with one observation (rather, a rare prediction): There’s no “happy ending” to this current America story in the sense that we return to the way we were (another movie reference) before these ten years happened. Too much pottery has been broken for that. If we manage to break this current trajectory at some future point, we’ll be forced to start anew. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing, but it will be up to those who can embrace that reality to see it thru. Who do we have out here with the courage and the skill (the character?) to do that?

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Let President Lincoln close it out (who more appropriate to the moment?):

“As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.” *

*1862 address to Congress.