I had some serendipity this week. Late Friday afternoon, I went to go do my laundry at a local laundromat where there’s free coffee and not too many people; something about the vibe there is quite calming and I enjoy it being in my weekly routine. There was a middle-aged brown-skinned gal chatting up an old white guy. Couldn’t tell if they knew each other, but the town is small enough that people are polite and big enough that people aren’t generally familiar with one another. I made use of the free coffee, and checked to see if the business cards I tacked up on the bulletin board were still there from last week. I sat down on the bench and with the occasional scroll on my phone, I do what I regularly do in liminal, mundane places and take in the atmosphere. I know - my grandma calls me an old soul!
As my clothes dried, and I retrieved them, a low budget crime thriller show playing on one of the flat screen televisions on the wall had caught my attention. A female investigator said the line, “Kill a bunch of kids.” The show cut out, and the words, “We’ll be right back!” came on. The middle-aged lady caught notice of it too and we got to talking about the shooting in Uvalde that had happened three days prior. I came to notice, from her accent, that she wasn’t Hispanic. From my own adventures up north in Sioux Nation, I could tell she was a native. She was quick to mention through our chat, that she was from Illinois, is native, and had a bunch of land up there that she was eager to retire to so she could get out of Texas. Our conversation about the shooting quickly transitioned as she said how surprised she was that Texas had gotten so rowdy, how the weekenders who come to party in our town had shifted from family-friendly vacationers to the miasma drifting in from Austin. She said how when she was at a restaurant with her husband that she saw a trannie go to the women’s restroom, and she and him made a promise to never go out for a late dinner ever again. I laughed. This sweet old gal was clearly flabbergasted at how quickly things have gone downhill. It seemed this small town woman from the simple flat plains of Illinois, where you don’t have to lock your doors, and the kids are quick to mention to their parents any strangers, had been dumbstruck by the noticeable difference in Texas; how quickly it has changed.
Most of all though, she said how political Texas is. It brought me to mention how the shooting itself has been so politicized, and how no one is willing to talk about the elephant in the room: community - or a lack thereof. No one wants to hold themselves accountable for being forgiving and immersed in a community. They want to let these kids grow up in immorality and decadence to become ticking time bombs with no identity, no skills, and no roots. She eagerly agreed, but brought up something that has stuck with me since, especially because of an interesting coincidental connection I had this morning while listening to a Soft White Underbelly (SWU) video, but I’ll get to that in a bit.
She said how the drug proliferation, even in our own town, has gotten so bad because kids have nothing to do anymore. Young people are literally bored out of their mind. They are not encouraged to go get hurt and have fun, to go on adventures, to build anything. There are little-to-no community gatherings focused on children’s activities. Communities themselves are normally only upheld by the last few octogenarians who actually know their neighbors or who the mayor is. I honestly think a lot of it is made worse by the politicization and parental disconnection from other parents. People literally feel too different than one another these days. A lot of the time, especially in Texas, the “community” people live in is one they moved to. They have no connection to anyone there (like me). They’re literally all strangers to one another, and the biding tension is one most people resent. Wonder why most Americans’ friend groups have been shrinking for the last fifty years?
Which brings me to Deke, and his appearance on SWU. Deke is a one-of-a-kind, nonconformist drifter type, and I mean that sincerely. He is well-rounded, not on drugs or alcohol, and enjoys an active lifestyle of, well, being a drifting hippie. Towards the end of the video, Deke and Mark got onto the subject of the homelessness problem in California, the severe drug addiction problems, and where it all stems from. Mark gets to the point about it being a parental issue, and Deke brings up, quite passionately, at 28:25 mark, how society needs to start with kids.
“You can build all this shit for homeless people and stuff - where’s all the facilities for kids at!?”
And it hit me: Society has been so politicized and organized in almost a hypnosis of commoditization and step-by-step processes. Everything is so bereft of joy and adventure, of an abundance of rules, of an abundance of surveillance. We talk about how dangerous the cities are, but it is not because there’s no rule of law “like there was before.” Hell no! It’s because we built too many damn parameters and choked out the childhood of kids, and when they’re failed adults, we normalize their existence as a lower caste and keep them down with welfare and never-ending handouts! We would rather create a system that is so furnished to employ obedience to commoditization that we disallow a child to explore who they truly are, to find out what they like and what they don’t like. As in handing a boy a hammer, and a girl a sewing kit. Taking your kids for camping trips. Or just plain spending time with your family doing wholesome activities with other families. We literally put them in a fucking soul-crushing government institution to be yelled at by resentful twats who only give a shit about an easy paycheck. They’re inserted into a pecking order of mayhem and violence. We teach boys that being creative and constructive is useless, tell girls that being modest and humble is passé, then shove them out into a bureaucratized, specialized economy that demands they shovel a mountain of debt on their shoulders to even be delivered an ounce of gratitude from some butch lesbian office manager.
No wonder your streets are littered with dazed fentanyl addicts! No wonder your men are browbeaten and your women are strumpets! You took every aspect of their childhood, boxed it up and tossed them on a conveyer belt! You made a world where they go to die. Well, not you, but we did. Our society did this and does this, and will seemingly continue to do this for the foreseeable future. Morality has slipped through increasingly porous crevasses in the landscape of social good.
And it brings me back to the laundromat with that nice native gal from Illinois. I told her how blessed she was that she had a good home to go back to, and that I’m basically a rootless rolling stone. She knew her blessings, and that was very honorable of her to recognize. She has a home where her kids and grandkids are at, and she even laments how buck wild her grandsons are roaming about on the farm. I told her that’s what boys should be doing! They aren’t doing good anywhere else!
It reminds me of my own family. My ancestors were quite rootless. All of them actually. I don’t have one generation that doesn’t seem to move from their hometown searching for “greener pastures.” I don’t have much to lose or gain, materially, whether or not your kids grow into the next fentanyl addicts in South Austin, or the next farmers to till a better future out on the range with their kids. Hopefully I have the chance to father some, but I do know they’ll have a much more different childhood than I had, and most certainly very different from the childhoods many kids in cities and suburbs have been having these past couple years.
I’d like to leave y’all with a whitepill, though. This serendipitous occasion seemed to make a deep point to me about the average person these days. I overhear political conversations all the time. It is a game of verbal ping pong with two sides mimicking something they heard on the internet. It is frustrating how natural it is for people to want to play this game of ping pong as often as they do. However, I notice when you cut through the politics of every damn subject, there’s a real light of care shining through most people’s intentions (keyword: most). When you bring out the spiritual, it really shows they are well-meaninged and selfless to some extent. They’re willing to set aside some new bizarre ideas so that they can maintain community, sense, and order. That native woman brought up how it bothered her how open homosexuality was down here, and she didn’t mean to be rude, but before she could even go ahead, I said how in good small towns you just don’t allow those types of people in, and she eagerly agreed. People desire order - even nice old native gals from Illinois. People want sense back. People want a country where their kids actually have shit to do other than shooting up fentanyl and having premarital sex.
That’s what circles me back to distributism, and how inevitable that will be in communities that want to survive the coming onslaught of complex societal breakdown. It might mean putting your money where your mouth is, sticking your neck out, and being yourself for once, but that is the step to take if you want your kids to grow up in a better world. I’d like to see it too, but once again - I don’t have kids, and until I do, it’s your job to take your damn kids out of the public school system, and get them away from the decay.
Raise your kids right, and give them an actual childhood.
“If the bringing of children into the world is today an economic burden, it is because the social system is inadequate; and not because God’s law is wrong. Therefore the State should remove the causes of that burden. The human must not be limited and controlled to fit the economic, but the economic must be expanded to fit the human.”
Father Fulton J. Sheen