Calvin & Tiny

I haven't been up to Marion, MI in a long time, since my mother died some years ago.  Bored, I drove up there a couple days ago, just to see if it was still the same.  It pretty much is.  I ran into a couple fellas I knew back in the day, Calvin & Tiny.

Calvin had to move into a trailer on his brother-in-law's dairy farm after he lost his 400 sq ft cabin on the Middle Branch river. He borrows his brother-in-law's truck every now and then and drives by his old place, to see what's been poached. A little wood deck has been stripped off, a storage shed is gone, as is a winter's worth of firewood. He used to get by doing odd jobs farm-to-farm, repairs, painting, hauling, whatever needed done. But now nobody has money to pay for labor, the locals either do the work themselves, or let it go undone.

"Well," I says to him, trying to find the bright side, "it looks like you haven't missed too many meals, at least."

"Shit," he says, "I work a few chores for my brother-in-law, takes two hours a day, if I move slows. Then I eat and eat. Sit in the trailer and get fatter and fatter. I get fat and think about my cabin. I built it my God damn self. It ain't nothing much, but I miss looking out at the river every night."

Tiny owns a gas station and party store on M-115—but the last couple years there haven't been nearly as many city slickers from SE Michigan coming up to *get away from it all.* Tiny used to give a couple high school kids part-time summer jobs—not anymore, now he and his wife do all the work. Tiny figures he can hang on two more years, then after that? “I’d rather not think about it,” he says. Tiny's wife, who is nearly as *tiny* as Tiny, says they'll probably end up working at the Wal-Mart in Cadillac. "If we can even get that," Tiny adds.

Omens, Then & Now

Been reading some of the more obscure writings of Francis Bacon, and was floored by how closely this matched my present mood, despite it being penned some four hundred years ago:

Hark, of late, when I do enter a shoppe, a mercantile house, or some manner of trading place—be it a market of victuals or a house of sundry wares, such as that great hall of trade men call Target—the presence of others, those wretches called customers, doth weigh upon mine own spirit as a yoke upon the neck of the ox. Yea, their very presence doth oppress me.

This selfsame affliction doth seize me not only within the confines of such houses of trade, but likewise in those foul taverns of hasty victuals, and upon the crowded thoroughfares where the multitude doth press and jostle without cease. Yet mark thee well! This malady troubleth me not within the hallowed hush of a library. Nay, nor doth it beset me in a bookseller’s shoppe, though therein it lurketh as it doth in all other places of exchange. For these be the places wherein I chiefly go.

Yet lo! Amidst this throng—this heavy and loathsome tide of human flesh, vile as meat left too long upon the butcher’s block—there be, as salt cast unto a dish most rank, a scant few women whom I should desire to know in that most carnal wise. Women slender of form, be they lofty or of lesser stature, golden-haired or dark of tress, ruddy as flame or even she whose locks bear the hue of some strange artifice—yet ever they be thin. Thin women of all ages. And verily, I do believe that should I have but one of them, take her in such manner as nature ordaineth, this grievous oppression would be lifted from me. Yet such relief is not granted. And thus, whilst I linger in the shoppe, the mart, or the house of wares, I do yet remain oppressed.

These customers—they do seem sinister… Nay, not sinister, but something fouler still. They are ominous, yea, they are dread portents. But what doom do they foretell?

Hell.

And so it is no marvel that when I step within a shoppe, a mercantile house, or some such den of trade—be it a market of victuals or a place of sundry wares—the presence of others, these so-called customers, doth weigh upon me as the very shadow of damnation itself.

I Miss The '60s

You know, when you look around at all the craziness in America, the tranxiety, the border neuroses, the imbeciles running the government and escalating the decline in the quality of life, the pockets of zombie homeless, the poor mental and physical health of the sheeple, the poverty, the absurd grabs for Greenland and Canada, and you combine that with the darkness from Palestine, Ukraine, the threat of war in Iran, this may be the most miserable state of the world I have seen in in my lifetime, certainly the worst in the last 50 - 55 years.

I was 7 years old in 1967, and I remember that time and the years until the mid-'70s as being pretty wild. The Vietnam war, the war protests, the race riots, the assassinations, Manson, the lunar landing—probably more chaos, death, spectacle and upheaval than right now. . . but the sheeple back then were mentally and physically healthier, they were far better able to accurately process what was going on around them than today's sheeple.  And I saw that in spite of all constant churn, the sheeple back then were far more hopeful, and much less depressed than the sheeple today.  The youth believed a better Age was dawning.  Look at those three groovy chicks in the photo above, look how happy, look at the smiles!  Nobody smiles today.  Now people are afraid of their own shadow, and of who’s pissing next to them in the shitter.

Even though in the late '60s and early '70s the American people were divided over the war and race issues, they maintained a higher degree of civility on the individual level. People didn't rage and brawl in fast food restaurants and on airplanes, they didn't shoot each other at work and at school.  People didn't call the police over every personal offense. Today there is open hatred of those who hold contrary opinion.  Much of this can be attributed to the dehumanizing effects of the electronic age.  The other is not a flesh-and blood-human, but a clashing electronic viewpoint in our timeline.  As people become more and more isolated in the electronic age, interpersonal relationship skills vanish.  People don't know how to talk to other people, let alone how to get another person naked for sexual activity.  Young people today have higher celibacy rates than medieval clerics.

It's the unpleasantness of other people, their meanness and pettiness, their appetite for violence, that makes our current day seem so much darker and hopeless than the crazy late '60s and early '70s.  

Other people are so disgusting, why even bother to hope for better days?  Who even wants to live with these people?    

No Answer

The soul that believes there is a Higher Power (from whatever religious or scientific faith) cannot answer the infidel's question: why does God allow evil to happen?

The believer will try to answer.  In fact, the believer often truly believes he has the answer.  But his answer is just one of man's homilies, usually one of the following three:

1. God allows evil to display the need for and glory of His redemptive work, His mercy, grace, patience, etc.

2. Free will.  God allows people to make their own choices, and most of them are bad, leading to the degenerate state of the world.

3. God allows evil because, although we cannot see how from the midst of it, it is part of a greater plan that works for a greater good.

None of these answers, or any of the lesser known answers, would satisfy the child, or the family of the child pictured above.  Currently we are witnessing the Israelis inflicting incredible cruelty upon the Palestinians. This is not a historical anomaly.  The Jews themselves suffered incredible horror during WW II, and, in fact, human history is littered with such suffering, both on the collective and the individual level.  

Even those who seem strong in their belief in a Higher Power can abandon that faith when tragedy afflicts them.  

Only one answer is somewhat satisfying to the human mind, the mind that assumes fairness and justice are obligations of existence.  Only the hope of Universal Salvation can ease the sting (and it doesn't completely ease the sting) of evil.  The belief every human being, at *the end of time* will be resurrected to eternal glory, an eternity free of tears and pain, which then offers at least a joyous future as compensation for the present misery. But Universal Salvation is a tiny minority belief in the religious and scientific faiths, and is rarely discussed or debated.

If there is no Higher Power, no responsible Creator, then the world's pain and suffering is simply a byproduct of the accident of life.  Life mutated into horror.

But for the person of religious or scientific faith in a Higher Power, is there really nothing better to be offered as a consolation for the suffering?  Is there really nothing more we can say than trust God's plan, His ways are not our ways, and in the end glory awaits (at least, glory awaits for some)? 

Is there anything else we can offer the injured, dying child, and his family?

No.

Hindus believe in karma, but that gives little solace in the here and now of misery, and besides, if we honestly assess human history, we see an overwhelming unbalance in the favor of bad karma.

The infidel shouldn't be troubled or surprised by the agony of life.  The unbeliever is convinced life is the result of a random act of violence so terrifyingly powerful it continues without end, and all the accidental life forms that it tore from the void suffer and die for whatever life form exists in the present, and they too will suffer and die and be the genesis of the universe's next miserable creatures.

Personally, I find solace in the life of Christ.  Jesus was despised and rejected, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, so much so He seemed stricken and smitten of God, He was tortured and murdered.  

So when I look at the broken body of the Palestinian child, the victim of Israel, I hear the words of Jesus:

The servant is not greater than his Lord. If they have persecuted Me, they will also persecute you.

I can only pray all the miserable people of the world are called to serve the Lord.