As Dave Chapelle said, modern problems require modern solutions.
Eleven years ago, I wrote about the safety of Diet Coke.
If you asked me if I’d write that same post today, I might have said no. Then yes. Then maybe.
The point of that post and so many others is my frustration with how we humans cannot correct a problem without going way off-course in the other direction and creating a new problem.
Over-correction is the only correction we know.
I get it. It’s hard to know when you’re on course when all you know is being off-course. It would seem like being as far away from the thing you need to correct for is a good idea.
It’s not, exactly.
Over-correction keeps us all perpetually wandering from the goal we say we want. Years ago I wrote about course correction in terms of what I’d learned when I took flying lessons.
During flight lessons, my instructor would always remind me to make "small course corrections." If I got off course while learning to navigate, I would be tempted to compensate by yanking the yoke in the opposite direction to get an immediate course correction, unwittingly over-correcting, and setting myself off in an equally wrong direction. Whether I was off course in one direction and over-corrected to the opposite didn't matter. In either case, I'd never get to my destination. The better approach was to gently turn the yoke until the needle on the compass gradually was on course. It took time and meant that for a while, I had to accept I wasn't exactly on course, but I knew, with gentle pressure, I would get there. Patience was required.
Not only is patience required, but so is wisdom. It’s hard to know when you’ve hit the course line and need to straighten out, or if you’ve crossed the line and are now off on another wrong course because moments before, you were going in the right direction.
We have a lot of issues in our culture today related to health, education, intellect, ethics, motivation, morals, faith, and lifestyle.
Most of our reactions are just that: reactions.
Newton’s Third Law of Motion tells us that when two bodies interact, the force applied to each other is equal and opposite in direction. You throw a ball at the wall, it bounces back and hits you in the face. You react with full force against a problem, you bounce off in the other direction.
So the fix we’re chasing after today—more activism, more protests, more rage—sort of creates a confusing mass of objects whacking us in the head.
For example, the modern ills that are destroying life and culture are many. The answer is not to dig up the past and pretend like our ancestors had it all perfect because they didn’t have mobile and computer screens baking their eyes, chemicals in the food, and were not sedentary. Because it’s not exactly true.1
There are things about life and culture today that aren’t better, that are harming us, for sure. But there are other things that are an improvement (see that Diet Coke post I linked earlier). There’s also a pretty good chance the Second Law of Thermodynamics is also at work but no one wants to talk about the world winding down and a fading genetic pattern.
As I wrote in that earlier blog post:
Somewhere, either to the left or right of this place we're at, is the correct course.
But we’re in a two-party system in more ways than one, and we will never be on the correct course. Everything is action and reaction and we’re just punching ourselves in the face with what we throw out there and hoping a bloody nose helps the problem somehow.
1 In case my original comment goes away, here it is:
Maybe. But when various convenience foods and appliances appeared in the 40’s, along with other modern conveniences that only grew through the 50’s, my farmer grandparents quickly latched onto them because the truth is that rural farming life was brutal. They weren’t as healthy as you make out. There were goiters (big problem on the Northern Plains until salt was iodized), cancer, farming accidents, obesity (I never saw a photo of one of the old farm wives who wasn’t pleasantly plump and round despite being active in doing manual labor around the house and farm), maiming, hearing loss, glaucoma, vitamin deficiencies, low vitamin D (it’s cold and dark up here half the year), and lots of diseases. Sure, we canned a lot of our garden. But you also had to be careful to cook what you opened at least ten minutes because more than one family got sick or died off of home canning. Alcohol drinking levels were high because of isolation. Domestic abuse and violence were kept hidden. You can still go through the local cemeteries and see all the kids of a family that were taken out by scarlet fever or something similar with only a few surviving. My grandmother had T2 diabetes, and she wasn’t eating junk food.
Farming back in the day wasn’t beige and pink homesteading Instagram. We’re talking blizzards, death, smallpox, accidents, fungus and bacterial infections from farm animals (yep, I know personally), and so on. So when things like canned foods, cool whip, crackers, vitamin-fortified products (milk, salt, flour), and cereal (some of which, like malt-o-meal and those type, have been around a loooong time) came along, they embraced them. They had hard lives and it was nice if something made them easier.
So my grand father who lived into his mid-90’s ate some of this stuff—margarine, miracle whip, cool whip, canned fruits. He did get vaccines (not like today’s kids, for sure). So did my father. And so did I.
Yes, today, the vaccines, convenience foods, and screens are off the charts. The excess is normalized. I can’t and won’t argue there. But I keep seeing these rose-colored glass views of the past and it’s not precisely true. Genetics plays a huge role, and so do other odd correlations we don’t always consider. We go right to Monsanto and vaccines and miss curiosities and correlations like drinking well water instead of treated water (I did, and if you didn’t grow up on that salty iron-and-mineral liquid, you’ll throw up when you taste it), or of drought years and what’s blown up in the dust.
My mom made me cooked cereal (Malt-O-Meal and such) every day before the bus came to take me to public school, not because it was easy (you have to cook it, there’s time involved) but because I liked it and she thought it was good for me. And I still eat it today.
We have to find a better way of sorting through what’s broken today without an over-correction to our course based on an inaccurate view of what life was like in the past.
Who is “they”? We have this magical “they” out there we blame for everything. If we can slay the “they” we’ll make things right again. Well, no. We won’t. If you are a Christian, you know:
The battle is spiritual, not physical. Our enemy isn’t other people. The only beings who have been planning something for a long time are spiritual beings, not “they.”
We’re in a fallen world and that means things are broken across the board.
We give way too much credit to this magical “they” for all the incredibly evil things “they” do when the reality is that people tend to bumbling fools and the complexities we think they’ve woven ought to be pointing us to spiritual truths (God is in charge, he tells us what will happen in his Word, he said things would wind down someday, our real home is with him, not here) instead of pointing to these pointless battles against flesh and blood. It’s almost insulting to God, really, that we attribute all of this to human beings creating elaborate plans to destroy the world when He says its something and someone else entirely.
The lie the devil told Adam and Eve was that if they ate the fruit, they would be “awakened.” That’s the same lie I’m seeing used today to get people to shift their eyes from the spiritual truth of what’s going on and put their eyes on other battles and targets (“they”).
Additionally, it is logical to understand that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is at work in this physical realm, i.e. things are on a path to breaking down, not getting better. Our bodies, our genetics with each passing generation—all weakening. This is a feature, not a bug, in a fallen world. It’s why Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden. Fallen beings have no business wanting to live forever in fallen bodies. They couldn’t have access to the Tree of Life once they were fallen. We don’t see that tree mentioned again in the Bible until it’s all said and done at the end of it, when the fallen world is done away with.
Now, you might not be a Christian, so I understand, then, your fixation with this vague evil cadre of “they.” Of course you would think your enemy was people, instead of spiritual. Of course you would think the battle is something we do with our own power instead of prayer and through God. But this comment thread is supposedly attached to an account by a “Christian Man” and so that’s where I make some assumptions about his readership.
For the record, I neither agree with your thesis that most of the things I mentioned were created with the purpose to destroy people, nor do I agree with the idea that a cohesive group of “they” was behind, for example, iodizing salt and creating Malt-O-Meal cereal in hopes of killing humanity.
Being “awakened” too often means falling for another deception. In the past several years, folks who are proud to be awake tend to have forgotten the battle is spiritual. That’s not awake. That’s just the same deception, side B.
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