The Thomas Chronicles

Last month during the manic seasonal Christmas shopping, I dodged in and out of strip malls and palatial indoor affairs, which we also call malls, on the presumption of searching for gifts. What I found instead were rows upon rows of homogenized, repetitious clothing and the dull monotony of stores offering the same thing.

Oh, to be sure, there were some variation. Some clothing logos shifted the alligator (or whatever) two inches to the left rather than to the right; some shoes and jackets had bronze-colored nailheads and they were a bit larger than the silver-colored nailheads; and some shirts had pockets…

Beyond just mere clothing, I also recently watched an old video from the 1980’s and marveled at how human they all look compared to us. The people I saw had dynamic personalities, and seemed possessed of more empathy than most of us. The typical “man on the street” interview evinced an intelligence that’s virtually vacant from much of academia. Heck, even the floozies from the 1980’s had more personality than our politicians (which ain’t saying much).

How we got from there to here? I dunno.

I suppose on some level, by general consensus, everyone decided that people should be predictable, and their behavior should conform to a checklist of personality traits. If you are a fashion dilettante, you would have X characteristics. If you are an artist, you have Y characteristics. If you are an athlete, you would have Z characteristics. Some mutually exclusive, some crossing various categories. That is to say, a businessman would not have the same personality traits as an artiste but would share some with an engineer. And so on.

None of this is real. They’re cartoons we draw for ourselves that fall apart with the least amount of scrutiny. The problem is that we believe these starched fictions. The right presentation, the right gesture and thought at the right time could earn one a good job, a vocal praise, perhaps even a interesting partner for the night– but they’re lies, they’re not real.

We’re like Cookie-cutter men baked and rolled out by the dozens; we’re not individuals, but dough molded by the thoughts of others, and we tend to change our flavors often. To this person we’re this. To another person we’re that.

Without even realizing it, people “short-circuit” when they see someone not conducting themselves according to the cartoon script.

I’ve seen one stranger say to another one, “I know you. You’re like so-and-so on TV.”

When the addressed person protested and said, “No, I’m not like that. I am myself,” the other threw a minor fit.

“Yes, you are. I know you.”

Unpredictability is not a desired characteristic, no matter what other people might say. The eerie part of all this is we find ourselves trying to make ourselves what they say we are… at times even gleefully…

I can make the unqualified statement that we are less human than our forefathers, and I shudder to think where we might go from here.

Far from saying, “it’s all bad,” however, we stand a pretty good chance of received another renewing revival in America. Periods in American history are punctuated by low troughs and sudden surges of Renaissance and Revival.

That low period in 1979 was one such low period. Who could have said in 1979 when it appeared that America had entered her twilight hours, with our embassies burning around the globe, riots erupting all across the nation, that within a decade the Berlin Wall would fall and freedom restored to a billion human beings? No one (except maybe President Reagan) believed it possible without the missiles flying.

I submit that we are in another such moment, and our Revival is entirely dependent on what we do now. It is entirely up to us to choose to pray from our misguided liberals/ Democrats and right-wingers/ Republicans. Do we pray for our enemies or shall our indulged resentments and irritations lead us to the thing we all most fear?

This, I submit, is the question before us.