Tread lightly on the things of earth

Several weeks ago I had lunch at the San Francisco Bread Company in Memphis. I parked, got out, and pressed the lock button on my car remote keyfob, as usual. But no click, no anything; it wouldn’t lock the doors or set the alarm. As I manually locked the doors I thought, okay, the remote’s battery is dead. But then at my next stop it was working again.

This past weekend I visited the same establishment again. Same problem — no remote locking. Hadn’t happened since my last visit there. Now this could be attributed to chance, but chances are it isn’t. I think there may be a strong electromagnetic field in that parking lot — from a nearby power line? — that interferes with normal keyfob functionality (precedent).

This image then swept over me as explaining what’s going on politically in the U.S. It’s not that my friends, my former church community, my countrymen — many of whom seem to me to have checked their brains at the door concerning politics — have gone suddenly, irretrievably nuts. It’s that (I hypothesize) the Enemy [the weed-sowing blighter of New Testament infamy] has instigated a particularly strong force field over this land that’s warping nearly everyone’s ability to think, to hear, and to see. The distortion is curiously strong: I keep pressing the button marked “Wisdom” and nothing seems to happen.

If this wicked warp-field (and not the wicked-speedy starship kind) hypothesis holds, it implies that once the field is collapsed then sanity, responsibility, wisdom, and word/deed congruence can return to high tide, even quickly.

This hope beats the pants off my worry to date that these virtues we like to talk about are in fact AWOL for the duration of this generation, that an Alzheimer’s of the spirit had permanently gripped us all.