Happy Penultimate Day 2018, and the Biggest Story of 2018: Societal Trust

“Gentlemen, question mark?  Put it on the penultimate, not on the diphthongic.  You want to brush up on your Greek, Jamison.  Well, at least get a Greek and brush up on him.” – Animal Crackers

I got a new camera.  Not at Best Buy®.  I mean, I took the picture at Best Buy©, but I got the camera elsewhere.

We had another wonderful Penultimate Day this year.  The origins of Penultimate Day are shrouded in mystery, lost to the ages in the murky past before recorded history, way back in 2012.  On December 30, 2012, sensing that the world wasn’t really going to end as the Mayan calendar expired, The Mrs., The Boy, Pugsley and I piled into the Wildermobile and drove two hours to buy cell phones.  Stupid Mayans, if only they could have managed the whole end-of-the-world I wouldn’t have had to go shopping.

But I did have to go shopping.  Our cell phone carrier doesn’t have a store within 100 miles, so we decided to make a day of it.  The first time we’d bought phones, we’d bought them at a Best Buy®, so we went back to Best Buy© to look at new ones.  We didn’t find something cheap what we wanted.  We decided to keep our “has an actual keyboard” Blackberries for another year or two.

After not buying a cell phone, we ate dinner at Olive Garden™.  We had joked on the way back that December 31 was the “ultimate” or last day of the year.  We used the word “penultimate” to describe December 30, since penultimate means “next to last” and has even more syllables and sounds really nerdy.  Thus, December 30 became Penultimate Day.

We’ve celebrated Penultimate Day in proper fashion five or six times now.  I think one year a snow storm might have made the trip our pilgrimage impractical, but we did go again this year.

So, to recap, Penultimate Day requires:

• Get in the car
• Travel two hours
• Go to Best Buy©
• Whatever you do: Do not buy a cell phone
• Eat at Olive Garden™

I would like to have Penultimate Day replace New Year’s Day – I’ve never seen the attraction in a holiday that celebrates the obsolescence of millions of calendars and the shared hangover of people who spent the night getting sweaty, drinking Jägermeister©, and saying “woo” in crowds still and have no idea how they ended up in that alley with Johnny Depp, a juicy oven-warm ham, gravy, and that gun.

Some Penultimate Day observations over the years:

Best Buy™ is largely irrelevant and more so every year.  Best Buy® sells physical copies of movies, which is like putting a little bit of the Internet on a DVD® and selling it, making it more inconvenient to find when you want to watch it at 11PM.  They sell music, which is quaint.  Why buy music when I live in a universe where Pugsley’s phone did a Bluetooth© connect to The Mrs. car and we listened to whatever song we could think of on the way home, all thanks to YouTube®?

We introduced Pugsley to Dread Zeppelin on the way back home.  What’s not to love about Led Zeppelin® music sung by an Elvis™ impersonator to a reggae beat?

We left Best Buy© without purchasing anything and passed the fourth test of Penultimate Day.  No cell phone purchased.  Thankfully, the Gods of Corporate Provenance placed the Olive Garden™ pretty close to the Best Buy®.  I guess lots of people who don’t buy cell phones like Italian.  We got a table immediately and from the beginning I noticed that the service was excellent, which must mean the economy isn’t doing so well.

Wilder’s 80^th Rule of Economics states that the primary effect of a great economy is horrible waiters at corporate chain restaurants.  Great waiters get hired to sell stocks or become corporate lawyers or become the district manager for a PEZ™ distribution company.  When the economy starts to stall?  Great waiters show back up and the bad ones are sent to the Cool Whip® refineries.  I’d rather have great waiters than more corporate lawyers, and remember, someone has to pump the raw Whip from deep underground and refine it into precious Cool Whip™.

The food at Olive Garden™ has gotten better every year.  Sure, it’s corporate chow whose primary virtue and charm is consistency, but at the rate of once or twice per year it’s pretty tasty.  But just before I left the restaurant, I noticed a black and white photo of a little Italian market along a crooked little road between buildings in the restroom.  I would have taken a picture of the photo to show you, Internet, but my probation decorum prohibits me from pulling out a camera in a public bathroom.  Like Teddy Roosevelt said, “Never trust a man with a camera at a urinal.  Nothing good can come of that.”

The picture I saw was kinda like this one.

What really got to me about that picture (the one I saw, not the one sort of like it above) was that there was no one in it, but that lots of food from the market was out in front, for anyone to take.  And there was no one around to watch the food.  It got me to thinking, what kind of society builds that kind of trust, to leave food outside where anyone could steal it with only a tiny chance that they’d be caught?

Coming from where we live in Modern Mayberry, there is great degree of societal trust.  It seems like once a month Pugsley or The Boy leaves the garage door open all night long – I can tell because there’s no way that all of the junk in there is mine – our neighbors must come and put extra tools and tarps and motorcycles on the floor.  The Mrs., after several years, has managed to convince me that unlocked cars aren’t much of an issue, either.  I do lock the front door to our house – I especially don’t trust thieves at night – they know that you’re home and are prepared to be violent.  Thankfully, in our town guns outnumber people by a 2:1 margin, so the occasional murder is about passion or drugs and not random violence.

I mentioned the picture to the family as we drove home.  We talked about trust in society.  The Mrs. had a great observation:  “Not long after we moved to Modern Mayberry, everybody knew who we were and what our business was.  In a town that size, there’s no way that you can be a bad person and people not know about it.”

She’s right.  There is crime.  You generally know who was responsible.  They’re generally caught, and generally sentenced to fair sentences, though I will say the latitude for self-defense when you’re being robbed at gunpoint is amazingly high – you don’t want to rob an armed house if people are home unless you don’t want to see how Game of Thrones® ends because, you know, early exit from breathing.

In Modern Mayberry there’s an amazing amount of agreement on ethics, religion, and the law.  That provides the backbone for Societal Trust.  Societal Trust is important – it provides:

• Trust in neighbors to not steal
• Trust in business partners to meet their end of the deal
• Trust in government to be fair
• Trust in media to be unbiased
• Trust in elections to be honest

No, Modern Mayberry isn’t a paradise where all of these things are true.  But our government isn’t big enough for big corruption.  Neighbors don’t steal, but the kid three blocks away does, and we know who he is.  And the ladies who count the ballots take it seriously and are sincere when they thank you after having handed you your “I voted” sticker.  In high trust societies, things are easier, life is better.  People will stop and help you if you have trouble.

The size of Modern Mayberry is small, the residents have been around forever.  People are a known quantity.  Trust isn’t at the level of “When you’re here, you’re family™” – no, that level of trust is saved for Olive Garden®.  But people in Modern Mayberry do and will pitch in to help their neighbors.

Behold the saturated beauty of the Olive Garden© logo.  Worship it!

I had always thought that there was anonymity in cities.  But when I spent some time in a Chicago for work I saw that it wasn’t that way at all.  The neighborhoods were tightly grouped, at least on the South Side.  The Polish?  They maintained the Polish neighborhood.  Supermarket signs were in Polish.  The Italians?  They had a neighborhood that was next to the Polish neighborhood.  Nobody crossed the street between the neighborhoods.  There was a wall, but it was invisible, and each side patrolled their own side.  If you were Polish or Italian, you knew better than to cross the line.  They managed to find harmony though minimizing cultural friction along ethnic lines, the same way most modern suburbs divvy up the land based upon economic lines.  But that’s not enough.  Some leakage across boundaries is inevitable, and some areas fracture within ethnic lines.  That’s why Chicago has such a high murder rate.

Trust consists of finding points of agreement.  In my first Penultimate post (last year) I talked about what I felt was the biggest story of the year for 2017.  In this post?  The biggest story for 2018.

We are unraveling.  Our trust is fine here in Modern Mayberry.  It’s probably good in most of the suburbs.  Heck, most of the localities and neighborhoods across the country are fine.  2018, however, has shown the greatest division in at least the last 150 years building nationally.  Here’s a previous post on this:  Pulp Fiction, Epsilon Theory, and The News Isn’t The News. Really.

But what will bring back our trust nationally when we don’t even agree that we should all throw off our shackles, drive to Best Buy© on December 30^th and exercise our right to not buy a cell phone and then eat corporately-designed Italian food?  Unify the United States:  replace New Year’s Day with Penultimate Day, a far superior holiday!