Outside The Box

There was a story my father liked to tell about changing times. I’ve shared it here before but it bears repeating in the context of this discussion.

There was once a spring beside a mountain road traveled on foot and by horseback. It was long ago frequented by travelers who would stop to water their horses or refresh themselves, but times were changing and people were leaving the high country to settle in the valleys or around the towns, so the spring wasn’t often used when Dad was a child.

A nearby landowner had made the spring a personal community service project. He kept it cleaned out, and over time had taken amethysts found in the area and tiled the bottom of the spring. My dad said that when the sun caught it just right, the pool sparkled and glowed, nourishing the spirit as the clear water refreshed the body.

The spring remained intact for years, but one day when my uncle was a teenager, he came home with a few amethysts in his pocket. My grandfather strongly disapproved, but my uncle said the other kids were helping themselves. Nevertheless, Pa made my uncle take the gems back and return them to their places.

Sadly, however, the times had indeed changed. The grace period had ended, the bubble burst, and within a short time, all the amethysts disappeared and the spring was abandoned. No trace of it remains today.

Mumbly-peg was a game boys used to play with their pocket knives when my dad was young. To win the game, you had to flip or throw your knife in increasingly difficult ways so that it would stick into the ground. While the game is still played in some rural areas, it has all but disappeared today.

I got into trouble once in the Fifth Grade for playing mumbly-peg on the playground. The teacher confiscated our knives and gave us a lecture. At the end of the class, we got our pocket knives back. We weren’t disciplined for bringing our knives to school, but for using them irresponsibly.

Some years later during high school shop class, one of my classmates was bragging about his new hunting rifle. I have long forgotten the model, but I remember we were all impressed. The shop teacher said he would like to see the rifle, so we all went out to the parking lot where it was hanging on the gun rack in the back of the boy’s pickup truck. When we were finished admiring it, the teacher suggested my classmate might want to lock up his truck before we went back to class.

How times have changed in only two generations. This didn’t happen in the boondocks or some isolated small town in the hinterlands. Gainesville was a sizable town with an airport and a civic center and too much traffic during rush hours. While my experience might have been unknown in the school systems of large cities facing the challenges characteristic of urban life, it was not uncommon in thousands of towns and communities across the country.

The cynic says that human nature never changes and points to the horrors of the past as proof. The romantic and the armchair warrior with the receding hairline hark back to better times and the halcyon days of an idealized youth. The latter may fight on for a few years for a return to those times and when the fight is spent, stand their ground for a while like the immovable object against an irresistible force until eventually, resigned to the inexorable turning of the wheel, from the rocking chair will say, “Those days are gone. Things will never be the same.” But the wheel never seems to turn in reverse, and history repeats itself only as far as the spokes of the wheel turn in the same order, but always over different ground.

I believe the truth, or at least a reasonable facsimile of truth, lies somewhere between the cynic and the romantic. Golden days and golden ages come and go. They are bubbles, or perhaps eddies in a flood. They seem to appear by grace as much, if not more than they do as a result of intent and planning.

I don’t believe, however, they ever appear without intent, and that is my concern in the wake of the recent horrors in the headlines. Politics always seeks to capitalize on horror. We need to get tough on… We need more laws… If I’m elected I’m going to crack down on… These pronouncements are cheap, crass, and predictable.

The heart of the matter is in the stories I just told. Those stories are a reflection of the numbers which prove beyond doubt that the essential element of trust in our society has rotted away. A short time ago we could trust that a hunting rifle in an unlocked truck in a school parking lot was an indiscretion rather than a tragedy waiting to happen. Today we have to wonder if we are wise to allow a sharpened pencil. Our all-consuming distractions, like a fresh coat of paint, may hide the fact that termites have tunneled through the floor joists, but when our foot goes through the floor, we know the truth.

Politics does not have an answer, and the corrupted version we have allowed to develop is a chimera, which promises illusions it can never deliver with one hand, and accusations, reparations, and threatened punishments with the other. Its true purpose is to divide rather than unite. Listen to all the words and notice the scarcity of kindness, forgiveness, and hope.

Our nation’s sickness is spiritual at the root, manifesting in an array of psychological dysfunctions. We can address the root of the problem now, or we can wait for revolution and war to forge a new faith and unity as it has in the past, assuming of course that we survive the furnace.