Is it just me or do things right now in our country feel a
bit…crazy. Crazy. As in weird, strange, odd, disquieting, abnormal. Like we’re all just riding on the crazy train
and there’s no way to get off. Or like Alice, we’ve collectively
slipped down a rabbit’s hole into a wacky alternative universe, and we wonder
what is “normal” anymore.
Crazy.
This fear came to me as I ran on the treadmill at my local
gym last week. The good news is that as a
Lenten commitment, I’ve finally gotten up off the couch. The bad news is that the
fitness machines are parked directly in front of 17 big screen TVs, hanging
from the ceiling, lined up end to end, in the cavernous workout room. Regardless
of where I am or what I’m doing I can’t avoid this visual assault and since I’m
on a treadmill, no matter how fast I run, I still can’t escape.
First there are the channels that feature reality TV shows, like
“America's
Most Smartest Model”, “I Married a Stranger”, “Amish in the City” and “My Big
Fat Obnoxious Fiancé”. These are real shows. Do people actually watch this
stuff? Yes. Reality TV now makes up more than half of all television programming.
Forget using illegal interrogation techniques to break a terrorist. Just park
‘em in front of “Duck Dynasty” for five minutes.
And by some cruel cosmic joke, my favorite machine is four
feet from “Naked and Afraid”. A man and woman,
who’ve never met, are dropped into a remote location (a rain forest or deserted
island) and stripped of all their clothing and possessions, then forced to
survive for 21 days. Thank goodness the
show digitally masks certain body parts.
Watching the show is like witnessing a car accident. I know I shouldn’t
look, but I just can’t help myself.
Crazy.
Then there’s the news channels: CNN, MSNBC and Fox which
feature talking heads bashing each other, in a gleeful orgy of partisanship,
and of course it is all about the election. THE ELECTION. The one that began last March and will be
with us for another eight months. The election is like that obnoxious guest you
invite to your party who opens his mouth and sucks all the oxygen out of the
room. The one who doesn’t take the hint
to leave when it’s well past midnight and you’re loading the dishwasher and all
he wants to do is have another beer and tell another self-centered story.
Consider this. In my Sunday newspaper there were 52 election
related articles, about a quarter of the total paper. We can’t avoid it. The election dominates
Facebook, everyone weighing in with an opinion: pro, con, crazy. The election has hijacked our cultural
conversation. It’s everywhere. Since you can only say so much about
Presidential politics, a lot of what is being said is a cotton candy confection
of uninformed ideas. We aren’t even
talking to each other about the election.
It’s now just at each other.
Crazy.
Even when I leave the gym, craziness follows. I walk outside
into the middle of what’s supposed to be a New England winter and instead
experience what feels like a spring San
Diego day. This week the mercury will hit 70 degrees,
a temperature we’re not supposed to feel until May, right? The Iditarod dogsled
race in Alaska
had to truck in snow this year to stage the event. The winter of 2015/16 is the
second warmest on record; the first being 2001/02 and the third warmest, 2011/12. That’s no aberration. That’s real climate change. That’s real
scary.
As environmental activist Bill McKibben recently wrote in
the “Boston Globe”, “[This week] Across the northern hemisphere, the
temperature, if only for a few hours, apparently crossed a line: it was more
than two degrees Celsius above ‘normal’ for the first time in recorded history
and likely for the first time in the course of human civilization.” Makes
me want to run back inside and fire up another episode of “Naked and
Afraid”. Or maybe “Naked and Afraid” is
what we might call life in these United States at this time, when
everything seems to be a bit….
Crazy.
I’m not quite sure what the cure is for our communal
wackiness. Maybe we just need to spend
more time with each other, face to face, in the real world, far away from
sterile gyms and ubiquitous screens and virtual reality, which really is not
very real. Maybe God is pushing us to
take seriously all the challenges of Creation; that to live at our best means
we are to live in true community, actual community, and then work together to
make a difference for the good, for all people. Every person. Even the folks who watch “Naked and Afraid”
like me.
I know these hopes and dreams may sound kind of…crazy, but
in 2016, I’m ready for some sanity. How about you?
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