Thoughtcrime - Imbolc 2021

 

 

Recently, I was reading an article concerning what Orwell’s 1984 is really about as opposed to what people think it means as they decry certain current events as Orwellian. The article lists four terms that are central to 1984 without further explanation: Big Brother, Doublethink, Newspeak, and Thoughtcrime.

 

The concept Big Brother is well steeped in American society, to the point of us creating a reality TV show based on the concept. Doublethink (holding contradictory thoughts in your mind at the same time) and Newspeak (the control of language to limit the expression of unwanted ideas, at times by turning the meanings of words and phrases upside down) are both familiar.

 

But something about the last concept caught me. Just the word “Thoughtcrime” teased me like the tone of a bell at the edge of memory. A connection to a quote. A quote from the Bible. A Bible quote brought up in casual conversation, though not directed at me as an admonishment. All that flashed through my mind in an instant.

 

Suddenly, an association I hadn’t seen before struck me. I knew it would take me a little time to tease it apart. Thus, I decided to dedicate this musing to it. If all of this is familiar ground to you, I apologize. As well as for the light review of concepts as I understand them for those who have not read the book. I have a somewhat diverse readership so I can’t count on that everyone has.

 

Thoughtcrime in 1984 essentially refers to politically unorthodox thoughts and beliefs that run contrary to the teachings and tenets of the Party in Oceania (the dystopian society the novel is set in). Thoughtcrime is detected by constant and near universal surveillance by Thinkpols (thought police) through two-way screens. Crimestop is a mental indoctrination technique each citizen uses to prevent such errant and illegal thoughts. As implied by the term Thoughtcrime, those thoughts are criminal. They are punishable by death.

 

So merely thinking the wrong thoughts and having it detected through your body language or other physical cues is a capital crime in that society if you don’t self-censor, all monitored by a constantly watching authority. That sounded more than vaguely familiar. Something in there resonated with my past. Something about sinning in your heart.

 

It only took me a quick search to find the Bible quote I was thinking of. Matthew 5:27-28. In plain English, it reads (with Jesus speaking at the Sermon on the Mount), “You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery’; but I tell you that everyone who gazes at a woman in lust has committed adultery with her already in his heart.” The next two verses go on to say, “And if your right eye offends you, pluck it out, and cast it from you: for it is profitable for you that one of your members should perish, and not that your whole body should be cast into hell. And if your right hand offends you, cut it off, and cast it from you: for it is profitable for you that one of your members should perish, and not that your whole body should be cast into hell.”

 

If you lust against someone in your heart, you have committed adultery. Not by action, by mere unclean thoughts. The punishment, cutting out an eye or cutting off a hand, in the context of the body is death with an allusion to a congregation or body politic. Pretty straightforward and often taken quite literally in the real world as well as a literary one, as it has been in several of the churches I’ve attended and in many of the conversations I’ve had with more fundamental believers.

 

There are a couple interesting points to unpack here. First is the change of what we commonly define as sin to include a sin that resides in thoughts rather than only through actions. Of course, one needn’t stop with lust. Covetousness could fit. Taking the Lord’s name in vain. Really most of the big ten commandments, never mind the 600-something plus lesser commandments in the first five books of the Bible.

 

Second is the repetition of the graphic, unforgiving and brutal punishment as reinforcement that this new kind of thought sin is taken just as seriously as the other kind, layered with the ambiguous phraseology in discussing body parts as members, in this case likely of a congregation. So, a dual meaning applying both to the individual and to the society/congregation in which they participate. In modern parlance, those individuals are like an unseen cancer that must be excised to save the greater whole.

 

That attitude is closely echoed in 1984. Consider the parallel. In both cases, what amounts to an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent authority (all powerful, all seeing and all knowing) monitors and judges each and every one of us each and every day, not just for our actions but for our thoughts. The punishment for such pernicious thoughts/sins is execution in one case, eternal damnation in the other, unless you are rehabilitated/forgiven by the all-powerful authority that stands as judge.

 

While we naturally assume Orwell was talking about totalitarianism, specifically fascism or Soviet communism, the concept of thoughtcrime goes back millennia before Mussolini or Lenin. Which is perhaps why it resonates so strongly throughout Western society on both sides of the political aisle.

 

I can hear the immediate objections from people who think I am overanalyzing this. Yes, Orwell was an atheist who considered himself a humanist. He fought against the fascists in Spain but as a Democratic Socialist (a moderate), not a communist. Because he had attended meetings of the Communist Party as research for a book, he was under surveillance in England in a time where fascists and communists vied for control of his country. He witnessed the tactics of British Blackshirts up close.

 

Consider though, his grandfather was in the clergy. At a young age Orwell was sent to a convent school his sister attended. While he was not a believer himself, he could quote long passages from the Bible from memory. The verses above would have been quite familiar to him. If I remember them enough to find them in a two-minute search, he likely would have known them by heart.

 

Ok, that word association game is not what I was primarily thinking about when I decided to write this essay. It was fascinating to me that it flashed through my subconscious in an instant and I was able to piece it together. But that alone is not particularly meaningful or necessarily insightful to anyone but me. My mind extended the parallel into much more controversial territory.

 

You see, I was reading this article in the wake of the January 6^th insurrection at the US Capitol (hopefully by the time I post this, I won’t have to reference which insurrection I am talking about like a Soviet revolution, Feb, Oct, 1917, 1905). At the time, several key figures who participated, incited or supported the insurrection were claiming the consequences of their actions (cancelled book deals, social media bans, job terminations, etc.) were Orwellian violations of their Constitutional rights. It’s pretty much a black letter reading that they are wrong in terms of them being a violation but they are also wrong in them being Orwellian, too. The article makes that case much better than I ever could (you can find it referenced in the Notes and Asides in the comments).

 

Regardless, I was more thinking about why particularly fundamentalist evangelicals in this country continue to support the President who helped incite this insurrection, despite his actions, attitudes and lifestyle seeming to be completely antithetical to stated Christian theological and American political doctrine.

 

Many 1984 literary scholars agree that the Trump Administration has been Orwellian. They have strongly leaned toward authoritarian while at times courting American neo-fascists. During the insurrection at the Capitol, that flirting passed into an outright relationship. Its supporters have been steadfast and staunch in their denials of it being either an insurrection or in any way antithetical to American democracy to the point of deep-seated cognitive biases. Some of the most fervent support has been from charismatic, fundamentalist evangelicals, both leaders and lay congregations. That had me wondering why, or more precisely how, they continued to be convinced their support of this man was not only right but necessary.

 

Of the four concepts mentioned, I’ve touched on the parallel to Thoughtcrime in Christian theology. Orwell’s other three terms have resonance points as well.

 

Big Brother, well, what could be more like Big Brother than an all-seeing, all-knowing, ever-present god who is deeply judgmental and at times outright vengeful. The choices you make in this life are for eternity, no ifs, no ands, no buts. No mulligans. Not exactly the dictates of an all-loving god. Would you brutally punish your children’s sometimes even minor wrongdoing forever without appeal? If so, Social Services might want a word with you.

 

Doublethink becomes even more intriguing from a socio-psychological point of view. Many of the people who supported this insurrection (and by extension the President who incited it) have had to hold at times two contradictory thoughts in their head at the same time: their dedication to a literalist interpretation of the Bible and their dedication to the Constitution. As anyone who has ever been told that the freedom of religion clause in the First Amendment only applies to Christian sects because we are a fundamentally Christian nation, fully understands. Or anyone who has been told that gay marriage or abortion or even at times even racial equality violates God’s Law and are therefore Unconstitutional. Many of the people who directly participated in the insurrection are self-professed Christians but also former military or other public servants who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, including some current elected officials.

 

But this juxtaposition isn’t alien to fundamentalist Christianity. Imagine, if you will a god that so loved its creation that it sent to earth its only begotten avatar to be sacrificed to save its people set against the same god that wiped out nearly all its creation in a cataclysmic flood. Or a god who gets into a wager with a fallen angle who then capriciously antagonizes a believer’s life to win a bet (Job). Or a host of other inconsistencies. These are not easy concepts to reconcile. But Christian doctrine requires it.

 

So, is it a difficult step from those three to Newspeak, where up can be down and black can mean white, either of which can reverse at any moment based only on what your leaders tell you? That might seem to be a bridge too far given most fundamentalist’s literalist reading of the Bible and all its tenets (even the seemingly contradictory ones). Given that a literalist reading of any text is its own kind of Newspeak, a constraining and pruning of language, I think not. Literalist fundamentalism attempts to pare words down to a single desired interpretation while ignoring context, history, translation, nuance, ambiguity, parable, and allusion, all of which are what make the Christian Bible at times a rich, diverse text. If you are looking for precise details on how, which I don’t have time to delve into here, I recommend Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism by Bishop Shelby Spong.

 

And yet, the New Testament cites that the devil can quote scripture for its own purposes (which some will accuse me of doing above). Especially fundamentalist Christians are taught to ignore any quoted scripture if they think it is being used to trap or trick them into evil purposes. It’s a fallback position I’ve seen used again and again in debate. It’s an escape hatch that terminates discussion.

 

In reality, I recognize that fundamentalist evangelical support of the now former President and his movement stems from Machiavellian realpolitik, that these outwardly Christian individuals are willing to compromise and sacrifice their beliefs to achieve the goals they desire. The ends justify the means. They often embrace greedy, self-righteous reasons for their support, however cynical that may sound. And no small part of that is rooted in the same racial identity politics that played into American society around the American Civil War, whether consciously or unconsciously.

 

In political terms, Newspeak is how propaganda works. Even seemingly inconsequential changes in political language over time have been called out again and again. The Department of War becomes the Department of Defense. People killed in bombing raids become Collateral Damage. Demanding respect and social justice become Political Correctness. Consequence for actions become Cancel Culture. Lies or misinformation become Alternative Facts. Etc., etc. These language changes are powerful tools in shaping thoughts. Orwell understood that, as he discussed in “Politics and the English Language”.

 

Big Brother is the constant monitoring of the masses (especially by government officials) in an authoritarian regime to ensure they are faithful and toe the party line. In the aftermath of 9/11, we have all seen such monitoring increase in the name of security. In the wake of the insurrection at the Capitol, we will again. As we did after Pearl Harbor when we gathered citizens in Internment Camps so we could keep an eye on them. Orwell understood that monitoring from the twelve years he was under government surveillance for research he conducted to write The Road to Wigan Pier.

 

Doublethink is a kind of mental purity/loyalty test that in practice reinforces the political gaslighting that starts with Newspeak. And yet it works precisely because we all hold seemingly contradictory thoughts and opinions in our head all the time. It’s just to us that they follow some internal logic and consistency. Most of us are good at compartmentalizing, which anyone who has ever held a security clearance can tell you. In that, Orwell understood the fundamentals of human nature and the nature of power, as revealed by Animal Farm.

 

And Thoughtcrime is a form of self-censorship that instills fear and doubt by reinforcing that the monitoring is inescapable. That constant second-guessing and looking over your shoulder is what allows that gaslighting to work.

 

Combined, all four psychologically subvert any individual’s will, as well as their grip on objective reality and reason. Control thoughts and you control actions. Resistance is futile. And even if it isn’t, the amount of energy you need to expend to overcome that psychological overpressure is immense.

 

And yet, you cannot lead people where they don’t want to go. In order to walk them over an authoritarian cliff, you have to give them milestones along the way, ones they are so familiar with that they resonate subconsciously. Religious touchstones are some of the most powerful because they are so ubiquitous, if sometimes invisibly woven into contemporary culture. Even atheists use phrases from the Bible without realizing it. It is the most referenced book in English idiom followed closely by Shakespeare. I could cite Daoist doctrine to Americans until I run short of oxygen. If they don’t recognize something familiar in what I say, they will not follow me, no matter how much intellectual sense my words might make or how much benefit the individuals I am speaking to might derive from them. If I want to lead them, I would have better luck with allusions to Jesus or even the Bard than to Lao-tzu.

 

To be clear, my point is not that Christians are Orwellian patriarchal authoritarians. I do not believe they are, not all or even the overwhelming majority. Nor do I believe that any religion, not limited to Christianity, is always or even predominately good or evil. As well as providing comfort for events and circumstances beyond our control, religion serves a Darwinian social function, just as many cognitive biases do, one that would have rooted itself out long ago were it not in some way beneficial to the species. In this case it provides value through social cohesion. We are not herd animals as much as we are animals that derive overwhelming environmental advantage from operating in cooperative groups. Those groups, whether tribal or national, require social cohesion to maintain.

 

I have read that religion is regarded as one of the three legs of the sociological stool that defines a culture (the other two are language and land). A culture is merely a large-scale cooperative group. So politically harnessing that cognitive bias not only makes sense, it’s likely inevitable. The problem for a democracy comes when someone is able to yoke that religious workhorse to an authoritarian wagon. As Mussolini did so elegantly but brutally in Italy when fascism was born. Who Franco then modeled with his Nationalists and received aid from during the Spanish Civil War. Where Orwell almost died from fighting against them with the Republicans.

 

As I said, he knew a thing or two about authoritarian governments, having witnessed several being created, sometime from whole cloth. Even the United Kingdom during the Depression was pretty much touch and go with the British Union of Fascists under Oswald Mosley. And the Papacy eventually came to regret its alliance with Mussolini.

 

To paraphrase a popular expression, history doesn’t repeat but it often echoes. Which brings me back to where I started.

 

I admit, this might not be a compelling argument, more just a curious one based on the parallels. I recognize these structures might prove be thin and need reinforcement if placed under academic scrutiny. I’ve just outlined the contours of an idea that struck me. The touchstones and resonance points, while they do not make any outcome inevitable, perhaps make the one we’ve seen slightly more understandable. They create an intriguing association to me as a writer who constantly examines people’s motivations. One that I believe deserves further thought and consideration.

 

This, like all the other musings I plan to write this year, is meant as a starting point not a final destination. A journey and an exploration which we ultimately each must undertake alone as we try to make sense of our increasingly complex world. But sometimes it’s just pleasant to have a little company as we share a path along the way.

 

 

© 2021 Edward P. Morgan III

Switching Sides - Imbolc 2020

Recently, I’ve been thinking about an early experience in my engineering career. Specifically, about teambuilding and leadership, and how it relates to the events I’ve seen unfold within the federal government over the past several years.

I was hired at my former company as a systems engineer, part of a team that would integrate various hardware subsystems and software in a new, networked communication system for the US Navy. The program was somewhat unique at the time as it used rapid development and prototyping.  Which meant in my first two years with the company, we had to field and demonstrate two iterations of this data delivery system, the second to be temporarily deployed aboard a pair of Navy cruisers to test.

Those two years were hell. Not because of the deadlines or engineering challenges, though there were plenty of both. Not because of the mandatory unpaid overtime or the steep learning curve. No, it was hell because of other people.

Up to this point, the company had been primarily known for its hardware design. This was one their first major software driven systems. Not to say there wasn’t cutting edge hardware involved. There was. A phased array antenna springs to mind. But in the end, the big push would be getting the hardware and software to play nice to create a network.

Normally, that would have been the job of the Systems Engineering team. In a standard development cycle, we would have written the requirements and specifications of the system based on the contract, handed them off to the Hardware and Software teams and overseen their implementation, integrated all the pieces into a final working system, tested it, and deployed it for final certification and signoff. If all went well, we’d get to do it again, and again, until we had a fully functional system ready to be deployed throughout the fleet.

Like most plans, this one did not survive first contact with the enemy. In this case, the enemy was within.

The director in charge of this project, the man whose baby it was, was an old hardware designer, an engineer born and bred in the heyday of heroic defense contracting in the 60s with all that implies. Think a mildly toned-down version of Mad Men. I was familiar with the archetype. My father was cut from the same engineering cloth. I’d heard all his stories along with those of the older generation I worked with in my first job. By the late 80s, defense contracting had transformed like the rest of society, only somewhat more slowly.

I quickly developed the impression that, to this director, software was an add-on. A fad that just wouldn’t go away. Real engineering was done on breadboards, not in code. And Systems Engineering? That’s where real engineers were sent to die. At best, they were good for doing the scut work that real engineers had neither the time nor inclination to do, things like documentation, fieldwork and final testing. Ideally, all done after the hardware engineers had moved on to bigger and better projects.

Adding to the dynamic, I got the sense this Director firmly believed all engineering was a trial by fire. To mix several metaphors, cream rose to the top. For everyone else it was sink or swim. Mentoring and instruction was for literal pussies.

By the time I dropped into this organization, it was already divided into three armed camps, Hardware, Software and Systems, each occupying its own floor of the off-campus building the project was housed in. The cafeteria was balkanized into territorial cliques worse than any I’d seen in high school, table by table with jeers flying between. The work environment was a toxic brew of insults, undercutting and inter-team rivalry. Not the good-natured ribbing that all team sports seem to breed. No, this was the kind of interservice rivalry that nearly ground World War Two to a halt in the Pacific theater before FDR intervened to put an end to it.

We had no FDR, only a Trump who seemed to thrive in the entertainment of this environment with the hedge of protecting his favored hardware engineers. They were allowed, if not encouraged, to distribute but not necessarily endure the abuse. Most of their team leads sat outside the chain of command. They did not answer to the hardware manager or up through Program Management but to the Director himself. The definition of prima donnas.

Again, these weren’t the kind of locker room, “boys will be boys” antics I’ve never really had any use for or seen as productive. I mean the kinds of behavior HR, the company’s Ethics Department and the EEOC take a vested interest in, or are supposed to if they are doing their jobs.

In the best case, if we asked a question or explanation of a hardware engineer or design lead, we were simply ignored, flat out. I mean like elementary school: I don’t see or hear you so you don’t exist.

In the worst case, we were insulted with impunity, directly to our faces. We didn’t have the intelligence or IQ to understand, never mind critique any hardware engineer’s design. And by critique, I mean troubleshoot and point out when it wasn’t working. As in, our job. My degree in Electrical Engineering? A worthless piece of sheepskin not fit to wipe a designer’s ass. Race, religion, gender? Nothing was off limits. Who was sleeping with who and how, who grew up where and why they were traitors not citizens (which we all had to be to get a clearance), racial or ethnic slurs. Every day for almost two solid years.

Anything reported up the chain, even to program management, died at the director, dismissed as the whining of incompetent engineers.

Like grade schoolers everywhere, we adapted to our situation. We endured and deflected the attacks, defending the vulnerable where we could. We sussed out who might be willing to exchange information, and who might be willing to act as proxies or mouthpieces to get problems solved. We developed networks of contacts with the few outsiders who might talk to us or answer questions but only if the cool kids weren’t around.

When hardware engineers refused to supply the basic design documents we needed to debug the system, things as fundamental as up-to-date schematics and interface documents, we resorted to clandestine, nighttime raids. We searched workbenches, riffled desks, broke into file cabinets, and illicitly obtained combinations to cypherlocks to gain access to private labs. We made copies of everything we needed, down to the designers’ notebooks, all of which showed up in our lab without preamble or explanation.

Remember, as the Integration team, our job was to make this system work so that everyone could get paid.

But that’s all just background to what this essay is about.

At the end of the two-year, dual prototype cycle, the hardware was mostly set. The next phase, the phase where the true money of the contract was to be made, would end with the system being deployed throughout the Navy. That was fundamentally a software design effort, not hardware. But in order to preserve the expertise in the overall system, key hardware leads were transferred to Systems late in integration as design efforts were winding down. These were the people the company wanted to keep but didn’t have any new contracts to absorb them directly.

One of our problem children, a hardware engineer I will call Kevin (not his real name), got transferred to Systems approximately two months before we were scheduled to deliver units to the field for testing. The leadership of his team was taken over by his second, a hardware engineer whose arrogance was matched only by the mediocrity of his design. A man who had adopted the worst superior schoolyard behaviors of his prima donna boss without even a minimal level of competence. If anything, Kevin was a master of ambiguity, mouthing the right words to the right people to imply cooperation without actually following through. His second had all the subtlety and nuance of the sidekick to a bully.

Kevin’s lab was one we’d broken into. We’d acquired the combination from a former Systems colleague who’d been given access for related work. We’d pillaged it mercilessly, though not maliciously. We’d stolen and copied every scrap of documentation we could find. But rather than concede defeat and embrace a veneer of cooperation after discovering we held the informational keys to his tiny kingdom, he changed the combination to the door and refused to give it out. By then, we didn’t really care as we had enough information to piece together what we needed.

Needless to say, there was some uncertainty and trepidation the first day he showed up for duty in our lab. He was senior to all but the integration lead and one or two others on our team.

That day, like most days, Kevin was cheery, which I took to be part of his passive-aggressive nature for deflecting criticism. He asked what we were working on. Well, we’re debugging the digital part of your subsystem as it turns out, trying to get it to communicate to another terminal without success. What are you seeing? This, we gave him snapshots from a digital systems analyzer. Hmm, that doesn’t look right. Let me see the schematics. Hey, these are two revs back. Before we could address that comment, he says, you know what, I’m going upstairs to tell the new lead of my team to get his ass down here right now, and bring updates to these schematics.

And off he went. Within fifteen minutes, he dragged his former second to the lab, then proceeded to berate him publicly, telling him to get the problem fixed, in the exact tone and words just a week before he would have directed at us for bothering anyone on his team about a perceived problem. He was still an asshole but apparently now he was our asshole.

We all just stood there looking at each other, stunned, wondering what the hell had just happened. It was surreal.

This wasn’t one-off behavior. He did the exact same nearly every day for next six weeks. It didn’t matter if he was talking to members of his previous team or other engineers in Hardware. Except the other prima donna hardware design leads. There he softened his tone to something more like a smug satisfaction of pointing out an issue with their design, like he was keeping score.  But he used his contacts to update our documentation to the most current all the while.

The situation struck me very much like he was a professional athlete who had been traded. As soon as he was transferred, Kevin was playing for his new team, using all his talents to help that team to win, in the way he defined winning. As if it was all a competition to him. As if he honestly believed that abusing an engineer publicly was what we were doing when we filed problem reports during debug. His personality and tactics hadn’t changed, just the team he plied them for. Very much like he had changed jerseys, but continued to play full speed, full contact, now with his former team as his opponent.

Which a month or so later became even more surreal when he submitted his resignation and two-week’s notice. Come to find out, the moment he was transferred to Systems (which he viewed as a demotion and betrayal), he started looking for a new job, which he quickly found. So, the whole time he was abusing his former team members and Hardware compatriots, he knew he wasn’t going to stick around.

To him, this was all just the way you did business, the way things were done. Was it personal? Absolutely it was to anyone on the receiving end, because Kevin and his kind went out of their way to make it so. To him, that month was just a fun way to turn it around on his former colleagues, almost as if to demonstrate what it might have been like if Systems team had been staffed by competent (read ruthless) engineers. Like him.

He could have ridden out his last couple months without contention or rancor, just eased into a new company, a new chapter of his life. But looking back, I am convinced that he knew no other way to act. No, that’s not quite right. He knew. I could see that. He just wouldn’t voluntarily choose to use that knowledge even for a few weeks. Somehow that would have diminished him.

So why have I been thinking about him lately? What dredged up all this in my mind?

Until recently, I hadn’t really witnessed a repeat performance of Kevin’s behavior, not to the extent or the intensity I remember from those two years.

It strikes me that right now Kevin’s last name could be Pompeo or Mulvaney, or half a dozen others who, while in Congress, have completely switched positions. They, also, value team over institution. All the perceived injustices they went at hammer and tongs while in Congress during the previous Administration, they currently deflect. Executive overreach, lack of oversight, obstruction, corruption, criminal activity, any perceived misconduct they railed against as Congressmen, they now defend as prerogative and privilege. With the same tactics, the same lies, the same personal attacks and abuse they used before, whether directed at their peers or their subordinates in the departments they control. They would rather burn down the government than lose a fight, regardless of what’s right or wrong, regardless of what’s best for the country. While ignoring or compartmentalizing the irony and hypocrisy of their own actions. Bullies led by a bully.

To them, like Kevin, it’s all a game. And like any game, if you play, you play your damnedest to win, by any means possible, no matter the cost, not matter the carnage you leave behind. It’s an elaborate, lifelong fraternity hazing constantly paid forward only because you can. In the end, if you are talented enough, or powerful enough, or have influential enough friends, you will never be held accountable for your actions. Or for the damage you cause the overarching organization whose interests and employees you are supposed to be looking out for. It’s all about the individual or the small-t team, not the institution or the greater good.

It’s the rest of us downstream, and our government, and our democracy itself, that will pay the price when they move on to bigger and better gigs as the lobbyists they’ve so long lobbied against. Leaving the next Administration to clean up the morass they’ve dug deeper. In part because the easiest way to win in their minds is to undermine the institutions they swore an oath to uphold, then demand that they be blown up precisely because they no longer function. A Machiavellian strategy to its core.

As I said at the beginning of this essay, all this represents a fundamental failure of leadership, in this case at the very top, as much as any individual moral or ethical deficiency.

But valuing party over country always does. And there’s no correcting that. At least as long as these individuals remain in power.

© 2020 Edward P. Morgan III

Catching F.I.R.E. - Goals

Nearly twenty-one years ago, I left behind an engineering career to write full-time. It was a dream I’d been working toward fulfilling for the previous five to six years. Ideally, I would have waited another six months to a year to pull the trigger on that change, but circumstances did not work out. In hindsight, that additional time would not have changed anything except me getting a small hunk of metal to mark my time as an engineer.

When most people hear what I was able to do, they say, “You are so lucky.” And they are right. I am, in more ways than they likely know. I am not one to say luck, random chance, had nothing to do with my life. It did. As did what I, or really we, did with that luck (Karen has a big part in this, too). The two parts are really inseparable.

By the time I left engineering, I knew the profession likely wasn’t the one I was best suited for for the rest of my life. I liked the work, at least most of it. I liked the challenge of solving problems and still do. I liked many of the people I worked beside directly and still miss seeing them. I was decent at what I did and could have advanced farther. But the environment and prevailing attitudes were not for me.

Ideally, I would have found another engineering job with a company that might have been a better fit, preferably something involved with space-based communications. I looked but was constrained by Karen’s career and job situation which would not easily transfer to the locations I was looking at. Balancing two people’s wants and needs is part of the price of marriage. Even though mine was the primary salary at the time, it was not mine alone to say.

When Karen and I got married, I set some goals for myself. They had been rolling around in my head for a while. The first was that I wanted to do something that I enjoyed for a living. Too many nights, I came home frustrated with work. We spent too much time either hashing through the issues or trying to detox from it. At first, I wasn’t sure what that something I wanted to do was, but I settled on writing fairly quickly.

I have enjoyed creating worlds and characters and situations since I was fifteen. I have enjoyed writing since sixteen. The two didn’t really come together until ten years later, which perhaps sounds odd. But I had begun working on stories by then, one of which grew into a novel. I enjoyed reading about the process of writing and creating, the systems involved, as much as I enjoyed reading and experiencing them myself.

So writing was the first and primary goal.

The second goal was a timeline. When did I want to pull the trigger on it? What was realistic? What needed to be done to make it work? I took a look at our financial situation. By far our largest expense at the time was our mortgage. Previous decisions we’d made were already in our favor. When we bought the house, we didn’t push to the limits of our finances. We had already started paying down the note early. With that expense gone and trimming back on others, we could get by on Karen’s salary alone. How long would paying off the note take? Based on the numbers, I settled on five more years.

Getting to the first goal by the time I turned thirty-five was the second goal.

The third goal was where we wanted to live. This was more nuanced and complicated. Neither of us wanted to live in Florida long term. But moving while starting a new financial situation didn’t necessarily seem like the best idea. In the end, we did a trade study of the five locations we desired or considered which included inputs like cost of living, social network and employment opportunities, plus a number of others. In the end, we found staying in Florida best fit all the inputs.

For the moment, that meant staying where we were.

And with that, my goals were in place. The next step was how to achieve them, most of which involved long-term financial independence (the F.I. in F.I.R.E. above).

The key to financial independence is simple: Live below your means.

It really is no more complicated than that. If you ask most people who have achieved it, that is the one thing you will consistently hear. Where the concept is simple, the implementation is more difficult, but again not overly complex. Most of it involves exploiting a few well-known pieces of psychology, central to which is: You don’t miss what you don’t see.

The specific ways we have done that is what this series of essays will be about.

When I was young, I didn’t think about money much, other than how far my allowance would go and how to get my parents to spring a little more. I was born into the middle class with all that means in American society, mostly comfortable material life concealed beneath a thin skin of security. Then, when I was ten, my parents divorced. That was the first of two times in my life my financial situation suddenly and radically changed without my having any control. The second was when I was a junior in college and half my funding dried up, literally overnight.

Those two experiences started me thinking a lot more about money, particularly how not to be caught short again by events beyond my control.

As I’ve grown older, I found that one of the keys to life is understanding what you can control and what you can’t. The average person changes careers five times during their life. Some of those will be by choice, others by necessity. Those choices are set against, and often influenced by, a backdrop of economic events over which we have little if any control. Mostly we notice the negative impacts, recessions, layoffs, corporate restructuring, revised business priorities, personal setbacks and outright disasters.

My grandparents survived the Great Depression, a financial disaster that defined their generation. My parents experienced Stagflation, oil embargoes, rampant inflation and the market crash of 1987, all of which colored their financial world. Since graduating college, I’ve witnessed the Savings & Loan collapse, the Emerging Market Bubble, the Tech Bubble, 9/11, the Housing Bubble and now the Great Recession. Everyone has a story, a pivotal event or person that shapes their attitudes toward money.

For some that translates into never wanting to think about money. Like children living in an idyllic, Victorian world, they assume it will always be there when they need it. Others are driven in the opposite direction, always wanting more, sometimes regardless of the cost. Like inveterate gamblers they are always on the lookout for an opportunity to get rich overnight. Some get squeamish talking about money because their parents always fought over it. To hold that memory at a distance, they opt not to discuss it at all. A few tell themselves there is no reason to stress about money. You may as well spend what you have while you have it, before something or someone comes along and takes it away, like inevitably happens. A handful want it now, regardless of the long-term consequences. They’ve earned and deserved the finer things in life right now. If they waited until they saved and could afford them, they might not be able to enjoy them.

The majority of people fall somewhere in between. They muddle through their financial lives, saving a little because they’re told they should, splurging when they get a little extra, all based on their current situation, not any real plan or understanding of where they need or want to be. Most people don’t start thinking about retirement until after they turn 40, even 50. Even then, they don’t always know how much money they need to maintain their current lifestyle, never mind realize their dreams.

Almost everyone I know wants to retire early (the R.E. in F.I.R.E. above). They all think they should be able to. But when I ask them pointed questions like whether they will be able to pay for health insurance between the time they retire and when they enroll in Medicare, most say they hadn’t considered that. Or whether they have enough to cover medical expenses during retirement. Doesn’t Medicare cover all those? Sadly, no.

What about an emergency fund? The average American doesn’t have enough savings to cover even a month of their existing expenses. Ideally, financial experts say you should have enough emergency fund to pay 3-6 months of expenses. That covers events like getting laid off, having a major health scare, or experiencing a natural disaster. Or at least a dozen other things most of us never consider possible until they happen. Life, if nothing else, is creative in the challenges it throws us.

The purpose of these essays isn’t to tell you how much money you need or really how to get it. There are tons of resources out there more than willing to tell you both. The Internet is rife with calculators that will spit out how much money you need to begin a 30-year retirement based on your current living expenses adjusted for inflation. Every individual with a Social Security number gets an annual statement of their projected benefits which includes a breakdown of ages when they can claim it. Besides, I can’t tell you what you need because everyone’s needs and goals are different.

Let me start by saying that I’m not a financial analyst. I don’t have a degree in economics, personal finance or investing. I’ve never even taken a course. I’ve read books and articles here and there because, like many people, I find money an interesting subject. So I am no expert, and nothing I say should be taken as advice (legal disclaimer).

Throughout this life, I have been fortunate to encounter people who knew a lot more about money than I ever will. All I had to do was listen and learn from their experiences. Not all of their examples were positive. But I believe you can learn from anyone, good or bad, if you are willing to. Mistakes and missteps, whether ours or someone else’s, are the most valuable lessons life has to offer.

Where has that gotten me?

We’ve been living debt-free for almost twenty-two years, when Karen and I paid off our final outstanding obligation, our mortgage. A year later, I could afford to write fulltime because my engineering income was no longer required to keep us in groceries. I’ve only looked back twice, once when Karen was diagnosed with breast cancer and again around the bottom of the Great Recession. Both times, I was considering whether I would have to return to engineering to keep us financially afloat. So in dark days of 2009, I sat down and reviewed our financial situation.

What I found surprised me. If Karen continued working until full retirement age, our retirement was already taken care of. Between social security and both of our pensions, we would have the same income as we have today, as long as those commitments were honored. On top of that, we already had the recommended savings for health care expenses during retirement along with a healthy emergency fund. That was all based on what we still had during the worst market conditions in a generation while we were living on a single salary. And we were saving over a third of that each year, with another twenty years to build up more.

I was stunned. Reviewing those numbers allowed me to sleep peacefully for the first time since the meltdown had started some six months earlier.

Even with that peace of mind, I knew life holds no guarantees. As I said, two years before Karen had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Her treatment consisted of a combination of surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. Without insurance, the medical bills came close to $350k. We were fortunate. We had good health insurance with catastrophic coverage. Were it not for that, we easily could have spent our entire life savings on her treatment. We have been doubly lucky in that twelve years later she remains cancer-free. But over the course of that adventure, we met many others who were not as fortunate.

Had we found ourselves in their situation, we would have been ok. It would have wiped clean the balance sheet, but likely wouldn’t have driven us into bankruptcy. And we were still relatively young (Karen was under 45 at the time). We could have started rebuilding. As it turned out, we didn’t have to. That experience once again reminded me how quickly circumstances change. This time, however, I had been financially prepared. For both of us.

It turns out we were members of the F.I.R.E. movement before it was cool, before it even had a name.

So, why exactly am I writing this?

If you are a cynic, you might say because it costs me nothing. That, at least, is true. Finances are not a zero-sum game. By telling you how we got here I am not endangering our position. If you are a pessimist, it might be because my experience is worth exactly what you pay for it. That may be true as well, but you will judge that for yourself. If you are a pop psychologist, you might say it’s because I don’t have any children to pass this information on to. There may be some truth in that, too. If you are an altruist, you might say this is my way of repaying some of the generosity I’ve received, both in money and in knowledge.

That is the closest to an answer I can come up with. I was raised to want to help others and give back some of the generosity and good fortune I’ve received. I’ve met too many people whose personal finances were a mystery to them.

I was also raised to believe you lead by example, not by telling people what to do. The story I’ll relate is based on things Karen and I have actually done, not speculation or untested advice. While I can’t say it will work for anyone else, I know it has worked for us. Time and circumstance differ. Plan accordingly.

From the onset, what has worked for us falls into four fundamental themes: planning, patience, simplicity and discipline.

Planning because I need to know my goals to know where I was going on the journey. A roadmap if you will. How could I know when I’d arrived without knowing where I was going or where I’d been?  

Patience because like any worthwhile destination, for us it took some time to get there. Change is incremental. None of this happened overnight. There were great leaps forward and setbacks. Slow and steady wins this race. It lasts a lifetime.

Simplicity because I’ve found that on a long journey it’s best to travel light. Long ago, I discovered that all the best, brightest, shiniest new toys I was hauling around were weighing me down and holding me back. It’s more than a purely philosophical principle, it’s one borne out by psychological science.

Discipline because there were definitely moments when I was tempted to turn back. Or to celebrate a minor success with a major spending spree. Resisting and staying the course, if it’s working, were crucial in achieving the goal. Parts of this were tedious and time consuming. Many times I had to convince myself to stick with it.  

The items I packed for this financial journey were relatively simple and compact: A mechanical pencil and paper notebook; a calculator; a spreadsheet; copies of our bills, expenses, mortgage, payroll and checking/savings/retirement accounts (none of which I intend to share); an online retirement calculator; and a book of compound interest, amortization and annuity tables and formulae I picked up on a whim.

In all likelihood, you already know a lot of what I’m going to tell you. To me, most of it is common sense. I don’t take credit for the originality of the ideas. As I’ve said, I gleaned information from a number of sources. But I was never taught these things in school. As with most of people, our financial experience came as OJT (on the job training). Few of us ever get formally taught how to create a budget or balance a checkbook, much less how to calculate the impact of paying just a little extra of the principal of a loan each month.

A few principles I plan to cover in the upcoming essays are budgets, priorities/mindset, the magic of compound interest, the rule of 7/10, and average S&P 500 returns.

Let me start with that last one for a minute.

For the past 90 years, the average annual returns on the S&P 500 stand at roughly 10% (9.8%, but I round it up for simplicity). Which means, the average growth of the 500 diverse companies that make up the S&P 500 index is 10% in an average year. That’s two averages, first the average of annual growth of an index of 500 companies (that change over time), the other the average of that average annual growth over 90 years. Which means it if you were to invest say $100 in an S&P 500 index mutual fund, at the end of an average year, you would have $110. Which isn’t really true but is close enough for my purposes.

The trick is realizing that there is no such thing as an average year. Some years S&P 500 returns will be less, even negative (like 2008), some years will be more, even twice as much (like 2017).

You might wonder why this is important to our personal finances. In general it isn’t, though it did become more so as we started planning for retirement. But I find 10% to be a useful marker for making financial decisions. If I can save nearly as much by a certain financial behavior as I could by theoretically investing that same money in a mutual fund that mirrors the S&P 500, it is likely the right thing to do. 10% is an exceptionally good annual return.

Now it’s easy to get carried away with this. At least one financial advisor told us that if we can get better returns by even a percent from investing in the S&P 500 (or some other investment), we should do that rather than spending that money to, say, pay off debt. A lot of analysts and advisors think the same.

I am not one of those people.

I have always favored guaranteed returns over theoretical ones. Future investment returns are always theoretical. Past performance does not predict future results. The interest you save from, say, paying off debt is always guaranteed (as long as you don’t have a pre-payment penalty). For me, that’s money in the bank.

So that was the first piece of information I tucked away as I planned out how to achieve my goals. I’ll come back to it again as I go along.

Finally, before I go, let me clear up any misconceptions.

I’m not going to tell you how to get rich quick, or really how to get rich at all. If that’s what you’re after, you’re reading the wrong essays. You may as well stop right now. I can’t help you (second legal disclaimer. Now you’ve been warned twice).

I can’t tell you how not to worry about money. Everyone worries about money, from my mother to Donald Trump.

I also won’t tell you exactly what to do. I haven’t stumbled on a step-by-step formula for spinning lead into gold. No one’s entrusted me with a set of risk-free instructions for success. Nothing in life comes with a guarantee, including these essays (third legal disclaimer. Now it’s a magic spell).

Finally, I’m not going to tell you to live like a monk, regardless of how it might seem. If I were to claim five years of complete privation would deliver people to a promised land, I’d be unlikely to find many behind me as I charged up that hill, regardless of whether I was right or not. In fact, people would be more likely to break out the torches and pitchforks and come after me. Just look at the unrest in Greece and other parts of Europe several years ago. Austerity is not in most people’s vocabularies or a realistic answer to most of their financial problems. Rarely does it work. Just ask the IMF.

What I hope to do is get you thinking about the way you see money, whether it makes you work for it or whether you make it work for you. What I intend to lay out is a lot like my Swedish grandmother’s smorgasbord. Take what you like and leave the rest behind. Or sample a bit of everything to see what you enjoy. Or treat it like a potluck and bring something new and tasty to the table. Or just oow and ah politely as you look at the pretty spread, realizing you have healthier food at home.

Although, no matter which course you choose, I recommend you at least try the meatballs. They are kind of a specialty and I’m told they’re pretty good.

© 2019 Edward P. Morgan III

A Wine-Stained Book (Imbolc 2018)

A Wine-Stained Book (a reading)

In a conflict on which the sun never rises, battles are fought by starlight on moonless nights as unsuspecting citizens soundly sleep. Unaware or uncaring, they choose sides only slowly as each new situation pulls the heartstrings of alliances until doctrinal lines have been drawn. Unwavering, they pivot and maneuver with each faction seeking territorial advantage from the political terrain.

A proxy coalition faces off against an army of conscripted ideology whose unholy warriors see only life slaves in a kingdom of the dead. Memes and social media fan pre-existing passions and prejudices until embers glow along the edges of society. Each side undermines its own self-interest, performing opinion poll sortilege to the lowest common denominator through a series of false dilemmas and Hobson’s Choices. Eventually all but the most stolid have been assorted and arrayed toward contradictory poles that but a few years ago they would have refused to recognize.

Alienated by a common language, their right and left hands live in isolation wards where home- and hinterland are fundamental worlds away. To self-comfort, they recite internal fairy tales to relieve the anxieties and distress spun from the irreconcilable hypocrisies and inconsistencies of identity politics. Armed and armored with myths, misconceptions and misinformation, they craft an artificial irreality cast in the constant glare of a mirror chamber that transforms existential crisis into existential threat. In this political theater, the supporting actors forget they’re only lines, the audience never knows, and so the acrimony grows real. Ultra-nationalism, the aphrodisiac all rhetoricians use to seduce the young into battle.

A shadow war unfolds at the speed of plate tectonics, the boredom building day by day until one slip erupts into brief yet violent motion. As protestors and counter-protestors face off against clandestine provocateurs, a single misstep escalates into bloody conflict while police referee the sidelines. Miscalculation and misapprehension fan the open flames into full conflagration on its way to civil war. Carefully cultivated tensions spit and fume until prevailing winds shift carrying sparks that overrun the fire lines, fracturing the terrain. True and penumbral governments emerge and disappear as the fires and backfires they stoke rage beyond control. Most are bad at governing but good at coup d’etats.

To punish each collaborative province, they engage in slash-and-burn economics, exploiting every resource for prophet or personal gain. Divided yet unconquered, each faction carves out an armed, autonomous enclave. Militia compounds bloom like Balkanized alpine meadows or knots of prairie wildflowers, most brief but startling in their transformation of the landscape. Reconquista grinds down to the tactics of siege, blockade and interdiction with each leader skimming retributive tariffs for allowing anything resembling starvation level black market trade.

As geographic bachelors in desolate garrisons watch the enemy's wives and children eke out a meager subsistence, their thoughts drift home. Held hostage by boredom, apathy and ambivalence, they allow empathy to briefly overcome antipathy. In a moment’s inattention, lives end, lives begin, lives change forever as each side ruthlessly rewards only enmity and animosity in the geometry of exploitation and control.

Each clean, new widow, wiping away the dried rime of her tears, accepts her next role not as wife or mother but as a dark, avenging angel. Using the strategies of seduction, surrender and self-destruction, she exacts her revenge one unbeliever at a time, a soldier, a collaborator, a wayward child. Each victim with his own aspiring Valkyrie perched beyond his shoulder preparing to choose another sacrifice to the eternal flame.

And so we descended the spiral staircase, misstep by misstep, casualty by casualty, generation by bloody generation, until all that remained to mark our passage were the impressions transcribed into this collective record of a bygone age, carefully preserved as it passed from hand to unknown hand.

We are the inheritors of the accounts in this edition, a paragraph here, a sentence there, saddle-stitched together into something resembling an integrated whole. We, who emerged from this misty past, balance the ledger by keeping it current even as its ink fades like the dog-eared Polaroid of a distant memory.

Our words have enemies just as surely as enemies have words. We are all prophets in hindsight, our suffering inseparable from our destiny, our misery spiked with love. When no one else listens, we tell each other sweet lies in the dark as if living in a dream. But deep inside, we all remain the children of Cain. The pen may be mightier than the sword but its nib still needs to be cleared of blood.

The triumph over trauma and tragedy comes not in reliving them but in allowing them to settle into mindful forgetfulness. We all long for an ideal past misremembered, a misforged bell that we’ve forgotten cracked as we mishear its final note ringing in our ears. We are emotionally driven creatures who craft elaborate fables about being rational to lull ourselves to sleep at night. Sleep, the amnestic victory of children and the damned.

In these pages, the past shifts restlessly in its grave like a creature neither alive nor fully dead. We are the watchmen who do not sleep, the ones who feed its flame and tend its tomb so that future generations may remember.

As now are you who read this wine-stained book.

© 2018 Edward P. Morgan III

Imbolc 2017 - Penance

(This is an essay related to the poem Penance posted on the fiction side of this blog).

My 82 year-old aunt is one of perhaps a handful of people who could get me to watch a church sermon. In fact, she may be the only person right now. She does not use that power lightly or frivolously. She may not know she has it.

Several days ago, for the first time in more than a decade, I sat in a virtual church and listened. Because she wanted me to. Because she thought it was important. She was right.

What I heard was a story of someone's personal family history. An affirmation of the things I've been thinking and feeling since the election, discussions we've had and half-joking plans we've laid.

The minister wasn't joking. I heard talk of refuges, networks and vigilance. Not radical talk, measured discourse based on his deeply personal experience. Discussions I never thought I’d hear outside of a fantasy role-playing game.

I'm not sure whether watching it more heartened me or scared me. The congregation was sober. These were thoughtful, upstanding, rational people, not reactionaries, pundits or demagogues. It's not that his ideas were new. It's that they touched some of my deepest fears. Fears I actively try to hold at bay because, although I've learned to trust my instincts, I am wary of giving in to them too far.

I suppose at its heart, it confirmed what a church is supposed to be about, a community looking out for one another. My aunt’s denomination in particular is much more focused on the here and now than what comes after. They are progressive and proud, and have a longstanding tradition of standing up for their beliefs, beliefs in others and their potentialities, not just themselves, even when those beliefs are unpopular.

Watching brought back some memories of going to church as a child. Good memories. Memories of the church I was raised in rather the churches that soured me to the tradition based on their radical interpretations that I just couldn't sync up with either my own experience or the world. 

It's not that I see myself going back to that. When so many of my friends and relations renewed their church affiliations after 9/11, I found that I'd already tread a different path. One that works for me. One that's seen me through some hard times. Not always comfortably but successfully.

The crux of the sermon, without getting into detail, was a quote by Faulkner. “History is not what was, but is.”

The minister spoke on two levels, one being his family’s personal experience in the Holocaust, the other being our related current situation. I think that is the point of Faulkner’s quote, that history is not what happened in the past. It’s what’s happening right now. As each moment slips by, the decisions we make become history, ours and someone else’s.

So how does that relate to either Imbolc or the poem I posted. Well, perhaps that explanation is a bit more roundabout. Though perhaps they are also intertwined.

I can’t tell you why I wrote Penance but I can tell you exactly when. It was the first poem I ever wrote. I started it on scraps of paper over one summer while I was third shift in a convenience store. I have no idea what inspired me other than wanting to play around with a sense of irony, and for it to have a particular feel. I do remember that was the summer after a good friend’s mother died and he came up to see me once in the middle of the night to talk, I think because he was awake and he knew I would be too. I can’t say whether my listening helped him. I can only hope it did.

I kept poking around at that poem for another three years, transferring it from one page to the next. Adjusting a word here, a bit of formatting there whenever I ran across it. Mostly absently, more like a meditation or a distraction than a purpose. The only thing that mattered was that I kept it and kept it in my mind.

My senior year in college, I took a course in creative writing as one of my electives. I forget if it got designated as my one and only free elective or whether it was one of several necessary humanities electives. Either way, I think I was the only electrical engineer in my class who sought out various humanities and literature courses because I enjoyed them and still couldn’t get enough. Since there were only fifteen of us who graduated (out of 60-100 who started my freshmen year), I’m almost certain of it.

At the beginning of the course, we had to submit a piece of writing, a short story, the chapter of a novel, or a poem. Something we wanted to work on and improve. Something that would be read and reviewed by the class, then revised and resubmitted at the end.

Instead of writing something new, I dug out Penance. I still liked it and wanted to see where it stood. Time probably played a factor. By then, I was deep into engineering courses and a senior project that demanded a fair piece of my attention. Or I was just skating.

Either way, my draft got trashed pretty hard, from formatting to phraseology. Though even as I was getting crushed in a very public forum of about twenty other students, some of whom were quite talented, I was noting ideas on what I could improve. I continued working on it through the spring.

When I resubmitted it at the end of the quarter, the instructor seemed happy enough with the revisions. Of course, he still didn’t like it, which he told me right after the final reading as he assigned his grade. He said it sounded “too D&D.” Fair enough, though I suspect some of his personal feelings leaked through.

He used to party with the guys in the apartment below mine. Theirs was a Bohemian frat house while ours was more of a geek enclave. Every now and then when they got out of hand after too much alcohol, I took to pounding on the floor with giant duct tape wrapped PVC and insulation foam hammer left to me by a former roommate. That usually settled things down, but only into conspiratorial, gin-soaked whispers. I suspect they were plotting our demise. Thankfully, they had all the motivation and planning skills of alcoholic artists.

As well, at one point he’d taken a good portion of class session to rail against the university administration, his department chair (who was a friend of mine and a wonderful teacher) and the Secretary of Education. I called him out on it in private after class. He was not amused and opted to give me an impromptu lecture on satire. Which might have been ok if that’s what it had been. It was more of a personal rant against the unfairness of it all and how much he was disliked by the department. And how they were plotting to get rid of him.

So we had history. Or he was right and my poem was what it was which wasn’t fine literature or a postmodern examination of a personal existential crisis. Either way, I was happy with the result of my effort and didn’t care about the grade.

I’ve always felt a bit funny about this poem. Because it went through a public reading and summary execution, and because I took notes and suggestions as I cleaned up the corpse, I never felt it was completely mine. So I’ve always been a bit reluctant to claim it and share it.

But as I reread it as I came up with the idea for this set of Celtic holiday messages, it still sent a little chill up my spine. I can picture this individual, the choices he’s made in the past and how they affect him in his present. That, like Sisyphus, he is doomed to revive a garden that his previous actions ensure will die again. His personal boulder pushed up his personal hill as penance for what he’s done. It’s a story as much as a poem. It’s not my story but it is one I can empathize with even if I’m not quite sure where it came from.

History is not what was, but is.

So why share it now? Why today? Why at Imbolc?

Well, Imbolc should be obvious if you’ve read these messages before. Imbolc is also known as Candlemas. Early Christians poached it from the festival of Brigit (who got co-opted into St. Brigid), the Celtic goddess of fire and poetry among other things. So it’s a poem to share on a day of poetry, one that seems to fit with the winter and its discontents.

As to why I’m posting it at this very moment, that, too, should be obvious. We, as a nation, have made a choice. We have turned in a particular direction. Not in a measured, thoughtful way where reasonable people can disagree. In a divisive, potentially disastrous way. I see already deep rifts deepening. Both sides seem tamped and primed for revolution. Their positions are entrenched along the River Somme or a Maginot Line. Or the outskirts of Petersburg.

People all over the world are facing that same choice, whether to turn toward or turn away. Many are scared. Or frustrated. Or feel neglected. Some justifiably so, others perhaps not. With the latter, there are men well gifted in exploiting their fears.

I cannot say where this choice will lead. My hope is that it, like many things, ends up being better than we think, better than we fear. That it provides a measure of good along with the perceived bad. A measure of balance. A measure of progress as we stumble forward through this life, hopefully wiser than we began.

But that outcome is far from certain based on the early portents and cycles of history. I was reminded of that as I sat and listened to the sermon. The time of storms is near again. Watchfires burn the northern sky.

History is not what was, but is.

In an instant, the choices you make become irrevocable, at least for that particular moment in time. You can’t go back to undo those decisions, you can only move forward from that point. Only if you are extremely fortunate will you get to choose again and discover a portion of the road not taken. More often not.

There are consequences to our actions. So in the seasons ahead, be sure to choose wisely.

© 2017 Edward P. Morgan III