A Texas Church, Aesop, and the Future of Freedom

“I’m the plumber.  I’m just hanging around in case something goes wrong with her pipes.  (to audience) That’s the first time I’ve used that joke in twenty years.” – Horsefeathers

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“Why a four-year-old child could understand this report.  Run out and find me a four-year-old child.  I can’t make head or tail out of it.”

In a Texas church this weekend, the worst nightmare of the Left happened.  The only thing that could have been worse for the Left would have been a video of Bernie Sanders spending his own money.  A good guy with a gun (Jack Wilson) stopped a bad guy with a gun.  Part of what made it bad for the Left:  clear video evidence showed a good guy taking down a bad guy with a single shot.  To make it even worse for the Left:  the bad guy was a killer, shooting a pair of grandfatherly looking men in a room filled with grandma and grandpa types.

It was quick.  From the time the bad guy pulled his gun to the time the bad guy ceasing to . . . be was five seconds.  Five short seconds.  This was, perhaps, a final blow for the Left.  The idea that the police, who arrived very quickly (four minutes or less) should be the only ones with guns evaporated, especially since two church members were dead within three seconds.  A very well-trained citizen saved lives – how many we’ll thankfully not know, since he acted.

Not a cop.  A citizen.

Every Leftist commenter on the web that was trying to justify gun control in the wake of this tragedy couldn’t do so without defending the shooter as being somehow justified in wanting to rob the church.  The biggest problem in the eyes of the Left, perhaps, is that the churchgoers weren’t sufficiently Christian enough to quietly line up to be shot.  Texas is probably not the state for that.

What made the difference is that the good guy was able to ignore disbelief at the situation occurring right in front of him, and was able to react.  How could Jack Wilson do this?  He didn’t know exactly what threat he was going to face.  He didn’t even know if there ever was even going to be a threat.  But yet, he trained.  Dare I say it?  He was prepped.

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Ok, Zoomer.  (For the record, I’m neither.  I just like stirring things up.)

Jack Wilson scanned the churchgoers.  He was looking for data points.  He saw them and acted.

This week, Aesop over at The Raconteur Report posted his 2019 Quincy Adams Wagstaff Lecture.  It’s here (LINK).  RTWT.  As usual, Aesop writes excellent material – not only to ponder upon, but to act upon.  There are many wonderful points in it, and here is the opening:

Wherever you’re reading this, you’ve had unmistakable evidence that things aren’t going to go all rosy.  Perhaps ever again.  Perhaps just for a long dark winter of the soul, and/or of the entire civilization. There has been more than one Dark Age period in human history, and they will happen again.  You may very well get to see this firsthand, and experience life amidst it.  Howsoever long or briefly.

You’ve had a respite of some 37 months to get your metaphysical crap together in one bag, and use the time prudently.

If you’ve squandered that lead time, woe unto you.

This post made me think, which is dangerous.  At least that’s what my therapist says.  My therapist who says I’m “mentally creative” and “reality impaired.”  Thankfully, she’s imaginary, which really lowers her billing rate.  But what that post made me think most about was:

Mindset.

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This is what would happen if my imaginary therapist talked to The Mrs.  It’s funnier if you read the whole thing in a pirate voice, really.

Aesop mentions mental readiness, and that’s key.  The last 37 months have been, to put it mildly, an indication that we are headed towards a very uncertain future as the culture around us continues to polarize, as the monetary debt we face (all over the world) continues to mount, as soccer is still taken seriously as an international sport rather than a game for attention challenged three-year-olds, and as the international stability that was so hard won with the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War dissolves.

I’m not trying to sell you on any one future, on any one fate, unless there’s money in it.  But I am trying to emphasize the start of your salvation:  your mindset.  If you believe that the world will continue in an unbroken, linear stream, I can assure you that you’re wrong.  We’ve had the precursor warnings of 9/11 and the Great Recession.  If I am correct, this decade will bring tumult of a similar, if not greater magnitude.

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Evacuate the women and children first!  Then we can solve this in silence.

You should believe this, too.  Not on a surface level.  This is a mindset.  Your daily decisions should take these future unknown and unknowable calamities into account.  Why?

Because if I’m right, and you’re prepared a week, a month, or five years before you need to be, you win.  Also?  Society wins, because the more people that are prepared, the better we come through the next crisis/shock.  If we were all prepared, a hurricane could hit the shore and the stores would still be full.  When we prepare, we manage to make sure there will be less stress on the system during an emergency.

The other way to help is with skills, and the longer the crisis, the more important those skills will be.  And, no, your experience in saving the Princess® in Super Mario Brothers™ doesn’t count.  At least my therapist says it won’t.  Real skills provide for a basic human need, like food.  During the Great Depression, people gardened and farms weren’t big factory affairs – they were much smaller Mom and Pop style farms.  Even though there was significant malnutrition, starvation deaths in the United States were minimal.

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He said his New Year’s resolution was 1920×1080.

More evidence?

One of the biggest enemies of seeing reality is seeing the world you think should be, not the world as it really is.  People look at Antifa® rioting and think, “They should be arrested.”  They aren’t.  What does that data point tell you?

The government of Virginia is threatening to take semi-automatic guns, dedicate a team to confiscating guns and the government should allow honest, law abiding citizens to exercise the right to self-protection.  But the government wants to take it away and make honest people felons.  What does that data point tell you?

Government debt today is at 106% of GDP.  During the worst of the Great Depression, debt was less than 50% of the GDP.  During the height of the Vietnam War?  Debt was less than 40%.  What does that data point tell you?

I can’t promise the cause of the next crisis.  But I can promise that it’s coming.  Cultivate the mindset.  It’s the first step.

The key is to avoid despair even though you see the world as it really is.

“I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today.  I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet.  I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it.” – Marcus Aurelius Groucho Marx

I have been accused of being too cheerful from time to time throughout my life.  And I plead guilty – with a smile on my face.  Why?

First – I’m naturally an optimist.  I want to achieve the best, but I also know that there’s no fixed way the world should be.  There is just the way that the world really is today.  If I don’t let myself get upset at the difference between an ideal and reality, I sleep a lot better.  Does that mean I’m satisfied?  No.  I work with every fiber to change some things for the better, but I don’t let it wreck my life like a pink-hatted blue-haired creature of fluid gender when confronted with a person who had to ask what their gender pronouns are.

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The first two hours are rough.  Caffeine is my best morning friend.

Second – Life has been awesome for me.  I can think of a LOT of times that I thought it was ruined.  But each of those times resulted in a situation that was pretty good for me.  Am I worth $30 million dollars?  No.  But that’s probably for the better.  If I had that kind of scratch I’d probably make Elon Musk look like the model of public restraint.

Third – I’ll admit, there was a time (about a year ago) where I got a little gloomy myself. But as I looked around me, I looked at what we have done.  I realized that freedom has won here in the United States for hundreds of years against all odds.

There were 2.5 million people living in the 13 colonies in 1776.  That’s less than the population of Utah.  In that 2.5 million we had a Washington, a Franklin, a Jefferson.  Sure, Franklin in 1789 might have drank more than the state of Utah in 1989 all by himself, but there are men that are the equal to our founders, and they exist in every state.  You know they exist, too.  The tricorn hats and powdered wigs are a dead giveaway.

Always remember that there is a line.  If you look at them standing along the church pews, scanning the congregation to keep them safe, they look nice.

Heck, they are nice.  Until they cross the line.

Then they’re not nice.  Then they become good men.

So, to gently change Groucho:  The past we wish to cling to is dead.  The present that we have is generally not so bad.  And we have a future, even if we can only see it dimly now, even if its golden age is years or decades away.

Let us go and make it.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

15 thoughts on “A Texas Church, Aesop, and the Future of Freedom”

  1. I fully agree that when a bad guy starts using a gun, it’s crucial to have a good guy on hand with his own. From what I’ve read of the story, the church in Texas had reason to suspect that the shooter might get violent, which implies that the defender had time to develop a specific plan, rather than reacting with surprise and panic. It’s tragic that two innocent men had to die to “trip the wire”. It’s also tragic that there was no way to get mental health care to the shooter in advance and avoid the violence. And it’s also tragic that there are many other people suffering mental health disorders without proper treatment, even if they never become violent.

    I might argue for compulsory mental health care, because mental disorders can leave a person incapable of appropriately consenting to care, but then we have the Soviet example to warn us: mental disorders can be “diagnosed” for political reasons and punitive without due process. (Another example, closer in space but more distant in time, was the claim that women were plausibly judged insane when they used hunger strikes at the workhouse in Lorton, VA to protesting for voting rights in 1919.)

    We used to have mental institutions which were possibly tragic but certainly expensive, and now we have free-range lunatics which are possibly tragic but not so expensive. Progress?

    How do we prep for a world where even the meager mental health care that we have now becomes scarce? “Kill them promptly if they become violent” is one possibility, but I hope we can do better.

    1. Yeah, mental health flags are tough – especially when it still doesn’t keep people from getting their hands on the weapons illegally.

      But I bet the next shooter won’t pick a church in Texas.

  2. A good overview of the pre-game starting place we currently occupy….

    https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/edge-precipice-challenInvestigate%20alarm%20stickerging-decade-upon-us-erico-matias-tavares/

    And it looks like Suleimani just lost the coin toss.

    https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ENUdl03WoAA2c8L?format=jpg&name=small

    https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ENUdl05WsAAuSpa?format=jpg&name=medium

    Looks like the kick-off is imminent. Or iman-ent. As in Khamenei.

    This is gonna be a hell of a game. And certainly nothing to joke about, except maybe on some crazy blog that quotes Groucho while shows memes combining mushroom clouds and a creepy girl….

    1. Since the action started at the Baghdad airport, rather than in Tehran or on the border, I think Suleimani drew a penalty for being “offsides”.

      1. Or, maybe we should say that one of the black bishops got too close to a white knight.

    2. Heh! We’ll get around to Iran. But so far it looks like some of our Congresscritters are were elected from there . . . .

  3. Watching that guy draw and shoot was a good reminder that I need to practice more with what I got instead of shopping for the next great thing. Jack probably practiced pulling and shooting like that a million times and late in life he finally needed it. I couldn’t make that shot on my best day, I need to rectify that and hope I never have to actually do it.

    1. I know – I certainly couldn’t make that shot on my best day. So I’ll have to make my best day better.

  4. Aesop isn’t gloomy enough-he still thinks events can be altered. Optimists are delusional. But they can still be funny and somewhat fun to hang around. For about five minutes. Kind of like grandchildren, or in-laws.

    1. I think at lot of it is baked in the cake. So we might as well have fun and be the best people we can be. Or sleep in.

  5. Am I an optimist? Sure. I tell the wife at least once a week, ” They will move out. ”

    Can’t afford a therapist. Fortunately, I have friends who recognize that when I stop in the middle of a sentence there is either a joke coming or a new subject. Sometimes both. Besides, drugs are easily accessible these days. I can get Dr. Pepper and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups just about anywhere.

    I love the Groucho references. Groucho Marx is my favoite comedian.

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