Ten years ago, on September 10th, 2001, I boarded a train and headed west and things in the country were fine. On September 11th, 2001, I was still on the train, and, wrapped in the confusion of tragedy, the trajectory of the country changed. Somewhere on that four-day trip to Denver, I called my parents to let them know that I was OK, that the trains were packed with frantic people but still running, and that a train derailment that had happened between Sacramento and Salt Lake City was the train headed west, not east. They were relieved to get that phone call.

The tenth was good.

The tenth is always good. It is the day before. The day before someone you loved died. The day before you lost your job. The day before the accident. The day before the assault. The day before you get the diagnoses. The day before the bad news, the truth revealed, the hopes crushed. The day before your entire life collapses.

The tenth was good, but I didn’t know it at the time. I didn’t know the eleventh was coming, so I wasted the value of the tenth. The tenth is worth more than all the gold in the world once you find yourself in the eleventh.

The eleventh is always coming.

How you handle the eleventh, the twelfth, the thirteenth…do you hit your knees or raise a fist in anger?

I think of Good Friday, and am reminded that even though Thursday might have seemed better, Resurrection Sunday was on the way.

We can’t live our lives on the tenth. The eleventh goes along with it, unforeseen and unstoppable. When it does, though it seems impossible, Resurrection Sunday comes, too. It might be three days or a tenth anniversary, but it comes.

The reader need merely select any story from the current crop of flood-related articles on the local newspaper’s website, and go to the comments accompanying it. You have your random religious nutter sprinkled in and about the commentary, and the rare level-headed writer who is endeavoring to provide factual information or encouragement.

But mainly?

Class envy.

Short floods rush in and provide for chaotic heroism. The devastation comes quickly, catching everyone off guard and not giving anyone a chance to think of reasons to not help or hate. People pitch in, become generous, and are able to maintain it for a short duration. Everyone gives everything, for it is a bit easier: it will only be for a short while. The water drops, and the next element of crisis, the cleanup, begins. The same thing happens. There is less time for grumbling. There is less time to over-think helping. There is no time to make it normal; it remains devastating.

The flood in Bismarck/Mandan has been going on since May. Read that again: SINCE MAY. It is now mid-July and it will not be abating any time soon, if you consider that the water is still very high and that the flood cleanup is still a long way off. I know that Minot has the national attention, but the flood here is a different animal entirely, one that slipped in just slowly enough to provide some triage preparation, but has still devastated large swaths of property and people. It changed the face of two seasons, and the geography, for the region. Can you imagine living temporarily out of your home for this many months, some without homes to return to possibly just before a North Dakota winter sets in?

Sadly, the mighty Missouri has been overflowing her banks long enough for it to become a kind of “normal” and allow people time to  start formalizing already-held grudges in terms of how they are to be interpreted through the lens of this flood. I sit and read the comments section of the paper, and listen to people talking (myself included), and realize that a long flood is a much different animal than a short flood. The immediate needs of humanity are lost to time and desensitization, the human face of personal tragedy is another dramatic above-the-fold photograph to be thrown out tomorrow, and the meat of it simply becomes a matter of who is going to pay and by god, I’m not going to see my taxes raised to help those people in those big fancy houses who were dumb enough to live by a river.

(Nearly all cities are built on rivers. Not all people affected had big fancy houses.)

How strange that a necessary component of human survival — a kind of absorption of the awful so that it became livable and normal — also hinders it. Callouses protect, because they keep us from feeling.

I can only imagine the conversation on Noah’s ark, a flood which was, oddly, shorter than the one still going on here and with far fewer angry animals.

Envy is ruinous.

So no — I don’t identify with a generation that grew up on texting and MP3 players and laptops in school. For this reason, I went into watching the Frontline report fully prepped to be disgusted by the state of things today. Reading David Shenk’s Data Smog¹ back in college had solidified some of my Luddite tendencies, despite the schizophrenic reality of being a computer and tech junky at the same time.

After watching the Frontline program, I can’t say that I have changed my mind, being a proper curmudgeon and fully against what digital life does to relationships, our ability to focus, and our ability to comprehend what is important and lasting. However, one statement caused me to pause in my bobble-headed disagreement. In a discussion on the lack of reading of traditional paper books, one expert gently questioned our adherence to a medium in which to transmit knowledge, history and story. He described how, in moving from the oral tradition to the written word, things were changed and lost in their own way as any shift in medium will cause, and that suddenly, the stories and knowledge people used to memorize and carry around in their head were now literally bound to paper. We became a people who entrusted things to paper and did less memorizing. What had been portable was now strapped to a physical object. We no longer had to rely on our memory, and while this new medium perhaps allowed for a wider spread of knowledge that lacked the danger of faulty memories altering it, it also meant that an entire way of thinking was changed.

Last week, Borders Books filed for bankruptcy. Perhaps that physical object isn’t as solid as it once was.

As of late, I haven’t really helped big box bookstores. I frequently roam through Barnes and Noble using an app on my cell phone to capture barcodes on the books I am interested and then find them through Amazon.com, which is usually cheaper. I may order them right there, though I usually push them to my wish list for later which, surprisingly, gives me the same feeling of “buying” a book though I likely never make the purchase. If the book is available in an eBook version and it is of a topic that I consider low on the hierarchy (more on that later), I may buy it for my Kindle. Either way, whether I get a paper book or an ebook, I’m not helping the brick and mortar store. I am fully aware that I appreciate having the bookstore and its cafe, but I do not, in my actions, help to keep it in existence. I am aware of the dichotomy in my behavior.

This was not always so.

Until this past December, when someone gave me a Kindle ebook reader for Christmas, I had been a staunch supporter of Real Books, which I have lately begun to think of as a strange concept, as if “real” only applied to something I could hold in my hand. While it is true the sense experience with a book is enjoyable (feel of the paper, smell of the ink), that is merely and truly just medium. Had the oral traditions of the past been any less real? Once I got my Kindle, I discovered a love for the new medium. While it didn’t replace my feelings of enjoyment towards a paper book, it opened up some new possibilities in portability, pricing, access, and storage. I found I read more, since I didn’t have to fuss about what book to bring with me while traveling; instead of one or two, I brought 20. It didn’t register in me that I was hastening the downfall of the intellectual world, but instead, was participating in a new shift in medium. This is always painful for someone; in particular, those with a financial interest in the formats and distribution of the old.

I have been involved in a couple of interesting discussions on Facebook, based on the comments from someone attending the TOCCON, where changes in the publishing world are the topic of discussion. Rather than re-discuss here, I have made a few screen grabs of these conversations: Image 1, Image 2, Image 3

I still have books, as I mentioned in those discussions. I am to the point of thinking of books (and other possessions) in a manner of triage, or hierarchy. What books will I re-read and return to, and which books are taking up space on my shelf because of pride, whispers of hoarding, or some such other reason? I admit many of my books fall into the latter category. And now I am getting rid of them.

They aren’t bad books. They’re just books I’ve read and won’t likely re-read. They’re books that I want to give someone else a chance at. They’re books I don’t consider timely, integral, or are no longer beneficial to my life. (This can also apply to my CD and DVD collection).

Part of what I’m personally going through right now has had an effect on my opinion. In the past, I was a die-hard bibliophile and had amassed a large personal library of about 1000 books. It was excessive. There is no need for all of those books. At this point, fresh from a move to a new apartment and with another round of culling my book collection, combined with my earlier round of seriously getting rid of excessive amounts of clothing and the soon-to-come purging of art and art supplies, I have to ask other Western Christians the following: What book, save one, do you need to have? What things do you REALLY need?

I am quite serious about this.

I question the idea of us protecting, so fervently, our things.

Things of this world pass away.

Why are we debating the threats to ownership of things, pondering the ability to pass down to future generations our books, and fretting about content providers who might take away or increase the price of the content? Am I so filled with myself that I think the future generations will want my books? Or even worse, my writing? If it passes away, I say — good! The less distraction we have and the fewer things we have, the more we can focus on the truly important.

I don’t think I need to hang on to my Douglas Adams books, or all my Asimov books, or even my copies of the “classics.” I really don’t. Good reads, sure, but I’ve read them and the parts that have stuck with me are enough. In the event that all my digital content — music, movies, ebooks — is wiped away, I would rather be able to sigh in relief that the burden of too much information and entertainment has been completely removed; I am not able to make that leap for myself, and the happy surgical accident of immediate amputation of things shouldn’t be feared. It is the fastest way that my focus can be returned to that which matters: Christ, and the living people around me. In Christ I find Truth, and the people who are dear to me I find the stories that matter.

That would be Real People, and not the ones in the Real Books.

This sounds very Sunday-school-ish, I know, but if or when you get to the place in life that I miraculously find myself in (and it is a miracle, because I’ve historically never been able to get rid of or throw things), you will understand the real joy in not having so many possessions. The real joy is in relieving the responsibility of being caretaker of so many things.

Am I telling you not to read? Absolutely  not. By all means, read! Read paper books, ebooks, library books — read! Read, and learn. Read, and return. Read, and give away or share. Read, and absorb what you were meant to. But do you have to own? Must you HAVE the book? Why would I lose sleep, if I am an avid reader already and have decades of reading and accumulated knowledge under my belt, over whether or not I have the physical book on my shelf? Why must I have all this stuff?!

Possessions possess you, even if it is a really good book or a fine music collection or your favorite movies.

You only need one book.

Let all of that other stuff go.

———————

¹ Read Shenk’s thoughts on his book ten years later.

Q.

A. By making note of the amount of quotation marks used in the column. (e.g. The “voters” made a “decision” and did what they thought “best.”)

Interestingly enough, when the Democrats swept through Washington and instilled themselves just a few years back, the reasons for their success weren’t a “lack of coherent message” by the opposition, or an unintelligent and unimaginative populace acting out like children, but because the people had finally had enough, come to their senses, and voted correctly.

That was the impression I got, anyway. I fail to see how that round of voting carried more meaning than the current round.

This election, amazingly, has revealed that same previously intelligent populace which voted the Democrats to power to now be in a state of stupidity and unable to understand the supposedly unclear Democratic message. I’ve read several columns, from the apoplectic column¹ by Vanity Fair’s editor, all the way down to a local columnist bemoaning the fact that, somehow, we voters just didn’t understand how foolish we were when we voted just a few days ago. I might suggest that these writers don’t understand the anger, the disillusionment, and weariness the people have over the current state of the nation from their currently employed state of existence.

Health reform, for example.

What do they expect people to do after watching banks being bailed out and money pouring into the pockets of failed institutions while they lose their job? Do they actually think, come election, that the proper “narrative” will help?

The process of voting and the right for people to use it has been negated, essentially, if you read these kinds of columns. According to the actual column I read today — “Some of the people they have installed appear to me to be little more than different rascals…” — I am led to believe that as voters voting, which by its very nature means someone is chosen and someone isn’t, we have done our duty for no reason. The choice of the voters is for naught. Same rascals, different name.

That is an unhealthy view of this nation’s citizens, government, constitution, and future. It’s also about crying sour grapes.

Between the two columns, this is what I learned about me, as a voter, today:

1. I don’t understand what is/was at stake.
2. I don’t understand what is/was best for me.
3. I’m acting like a child.
4. I have it good in America. Why should I “complain” by voting people out of power?

The key reason for the election outcome, I’m told, is that conservatives had a better narrative (which they probably do, seeing as how they aren’t surgically attached to teleprompters): “…[T]he Democrats were not so much beaten in 2010 as self-defeated,” the local columnist said.

I disagree. (I leave the self-defeating up to the Dallas Cowboys and their penalties). In this past election, the Democrats got their asses solidly kicked. Why? Because people did understand what they stood for, and didn’t like it.

The people voted no.

Period.

When a Congressman who has been popular for almost 20 years is now out a job (Earl Pomeroy), it isn’t because people didn’t understand him or misheard his message. It is because he made decisions in Washington which eventually led to his mea-culpa-last-ditch-election commercial swearing that he wasn’t Nancy Pelosi. In the commercial, he told North Dakotans that while we may not have agreed with some of his decisions, he had acted in our best interest. That is an incredible amount of arrogance on display, and the people responded with a “no.”

The voters understood the narrative, and chose to write an ending as they deemed fit. The end. I have never seen, in the face of such obvious loss, an attempt to find a way to say that it wasn’t an actual failure or loss.

If you were on the losing side, tough bounce. Your turn will come around again. Get over your own intellectual pride and suck it up.

——————–
¹ “A distinguished colleague of mine likens the wiggy mood of the nation to that of a hormonal teenager. What do you call an electorate that seems prone to acting out irrationally, is full of inchoate rage, and is constantly throwing fits and tantrums? You call it teenaged.” — Graydon Carter, a pompous dumbass who can’t seem to live or understand anyone outside of his own sphere of comfort, yet likely thinks he is socially evolved and tolerant.

So, I turned to my “official (and anonymous) Capitol Hill correspondent” and asked, basically, for a summation of what had happened. I think it will help in understanding what has been going on these past months.

“Tell me, in 40 words or less, what just happened,” I said in an email, saying that maybe I was stupid but I couldn’t keep track.

The response was a little more than 40 words or less, but well worth it:

You’re not stupid.  This legislative process is about the most appalling since…well, since the Republicans were in charge.

The “health care bill” proper has passed.  It’s ugly and gimmick-filled–it includes sweeteners for Nebraska and Florida and other side deals thrown in by the Senate to get individual senators to support the thing.

The bill first passed the House in July.  The Senate changed it substantially and passed it in December.  It was supposed to be dead on arrival when it came back to the House for consideration.  No one figured the House would let all of those side deals pass.  Then Scott Brown was elected to take Ted Kennedy’s spot in the 1967 Oldsmobile Delmont 88–er, I mean his spot in the United States Senate, at which point the Dems went from 60 seats to 59 and lost their supermajority threshold.  So the House Dems decided to just pass the Senate bill so that it could go straight to the President.  If the House had changed the bill at all, it would have gone back to the Senate, where we now have enough Republicans (41) to filibuster.

At the same time, the House Dems put together a separate bill (the “reconciliation bill”) to take out all of those side deals and correct everything they didn’t like about the Senate-passed bill.  The beauty of doing a reconciliation bill is that the Senate can pass it with just 51 votes–it doesn’t need 60.  The reconciliation process was designed as an end-of-year-type thing:  ”We passed all sorts of bills this year that spend money, so now we need to pass a catch-all bill that adjusts spending levels to make sure all of this spending fits under the budget we passed at the very beginning.”  Because reconciliation was considered such an important thing to do (back in the day when we pretended we were paying the bills rather than deficit-spend), the Senate rules don’t allow it to be filibustered.

So the reconciliation bill could pass the Senate this week.  And the health care bill itself will be signed into law Tuesday in a big ceremony that has led to the cancellation of White House tours, including those scheduled for school groups.  So a lot of little kids will be crying tonight, both about not being able to take the tour and because trillions of dollars have been added to their debt burden.

So there you go.

You can read the bill, and more, here.