Fired Up 3.0 - Final Thoughts

Thanks to Freddie deBoer

The United States loves a painstaking investigation. Malfeasance and disaster cry out for justice and while one can't turn back the clock, we are compelled to know what happened, what went wrong and who's to blame. Sometimes blame seems to be the primary motivator for the inquiries. Certainly, in criminal matters this needs to be the case - punishment for wrongdoing and when possible, recompense for damage is desirable for the good of the innocent.

The painstaking investigations surrounding a disaster like the recent wildfires in Los Angeles have barely begun and are really not the topic I wish to discuss in depth. We have been hearing that part of the severity of these fires is owing to a lack of preparedness on the part of the L.A. fire department. I think it is fair to say that almost all of the people familiar with the situation say that some unpreparedness existed.

If Los Angeles was under-prepared to manage wildfires, it means that the city authorities were allocating time and resources to other things. Logically, this must be so in the same way as if I am taking a shower, I am not grocery shopping. In my little life, I can certainly manage to do both of these things in the course of a day! The management of an enormous city is much more complex affair, but the principle is the same. Organizing time for the accomplishment of tasks that are not flashy but essential.

A week or so ago in my email was a Substack post by Freddie DeBoer ((3) Freddie deBoer | Substack). As with many of my emails, I'm not sure how this one came to me. Mr. DeBoer describes himself as a Marxist, and an atheist. He has an M.A. in Writing and Rhetoric (by the way, I love that degrees in rhetoric exist) and a Ph.D. in English. He says that he has bipolar disorder and has been in and out of treatment for his entire adult life. Since 2017, he has managed this disorder with consistent treatment and medication.

The title of the article is "I Told You: Chaos is Coming." He begins by describing an ultra-fringe group call the Zizians who, according to DeBoer are "a group of former computer scientists and financial market types who appear to have latched onto the effective altruism/rationalist movement and taken the AI risk, veganism, and animal rights parts to a certain extreme; the group has been implicated in at least eight murders." You can research the Zizians online, but dangerously whacky pretty much covers it. If they've committed eight murders, I suppose humans are not animals in their view and thus don't have rights?

DeBoer is interested in them "as a test case of what I’ve been saying for some time: that violence is coming, and that people will find a way to package it with meaning." Later in the article he says "Our culture has erased transcendent meaning and left in its place short-form internet video, frothy pop music, limitless pornography, Adderall for the educated and fentanyl for the not, a ceaseless parade of minor amusements that distract but never satisfy. And people want to be satisfied; they want something durable. They want something to hold on to. They want to transcend the ordinary."

Human beings search for meaning and when no meaning is provided for them, they are lost in a maze of "short-form internet video, froth pop music" and all the rest mediated perhaps through a haze of medication.

What on earth is going on? What are we teaching our children? What have we - like the city of Los Angeles - been doing when we should have been focused profoundly on the fundamentals of anchoring our children in things that provide structure and meaning? I could be facile and cite daycare, the breakdown of the family, the overuse of screens and devices and the under-use of nature and conversation, the lack of attendance at our houses of worship, too much permissiveness in parenting. It's a sort of "Choose Your Own Adventure" potential list of causes.

The fires of L.A. were made worse by the winds and lack of rain. But water still puts out fire. And transcendent meaning is the antidote to despair, hopelessness and Mr. DeBoer's prophesy of violence.

In the movie "Life is Beautiful", director Roberto Begigni paints a poignant and gut wrenching counterpoint to these poor Zizians. The hero and his son are in a concentration camp during WWII. The father, well aware of the bleakness of the situation, finds meaning and focus as he mediates for his son the dreadful things that are happening. He turns their experience of the Holocaust into a game for which the grand prize is to win a tank. This allows the boy to manage challenges that otherwise would be torments. He is protected from fear, terror, anxiety as his loving father spins his tale.

"The father is not telling the truth!" you will say. Perhaps not in terms of some of the facts in the case: there is no game, there is no prize, and there are many who wish them both harm. But the framework the father offers, is in my view profoundly true: we do have a loving Father who will protect us from fear, terror and anxiety whatever the ultimate outcome may be.

Another story from WWII comes to mind. During the Blitz in London, families were commonly roused from bed by air raid sirens. They'd head to the underground and wait there until the all-clear was sounded. A study was undertaken to see how children who'd experienced this fared emotionally.

Some mothers (and it was almost all mothers, since the dads were off fighting), made the process a game. We're camping out! We're hiding from Jerry! Other mothers were themselves a bundle of worry. "We're going to die!" "It's all dreadful!" "Hitler is going to be in London!" Unsurprisingly perhaps, the children of the former group were much better off emotionally than the children of the latter. And both narratives had truth in them.

There are very many dreadful things that go on in the world around us. Terrifying, destabilizing, tragic, painful, heartbreaking. There is something of a siren's song in the narratives that the prophets of doom spin. Extremes of weather, extremes of religious zealotry, extremes of political views, extremes of societal ills. They draw us into something that is bigger than ourselves, but we are quickly overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem.

Like the Los Angeles fire department, perhaps we should have done more to prepare and yet here we are.

For most of us, the impact that we have will be, can be and likely should be local and limited. It is in the small actions of very many of us that the prophecy of Mr. DeBoer's will be unrealized.

Let us give to ourselves, our friends and our children the quenching gift of meaning and purpose to something good and true and lovely. This is not flashy. It won't make us financially well off. It won't make us famous. It is essential and if we don't do it and do something else instead, the consequences may be dire. God bless us everyone.

John Greenleaf Whittier says:

Dear Lord and Father of mankind,

Forgive our foolish ways:

Reclothe us in our rightful mind,

In purer lives Thy service find,

In deeper rev'rence, praise.

Drop Thy still dews of quietness,

Till all our strivings cease;

Take from our souls the strain and stress,

And let our ordered lives confess

The beauty of thy peace.

Breathe through the heats of our desire

thy coolness and thy balm;

let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;

speak through the earthquake, wind and fire,

O still small voice of calm.