Sensible Things

My reaction to a delusional American electorate: keep house.

This week, I had to take some of my own advice. Back on April 1st, I wrote Touch Grass, where I advised people, when overwhelmed by the geopolitical landscape, to get off the internet and out of their heads, to go do something with their bodies that tames chaos in any sphere they can personally affect.

Monday morning, I was determined to get a head start on my weekly Substack post and bang out a rough draft nice and early to revise at my leisure throughout the week before my deadline. I do so hate feeling rushed about my newsletter.

But the geopolitical landscape was overwhelming me for obvious reasons. An attempted assassination of a former president, Facebook posts referencing Leviticus about blood on the ear being a special sign of consecration to God and trying to make it apply to Trump (really bad discernment there), Trump Derangement Syndrome heightened to hysterical levels with comparisons to Hitler again and dour warnings to look up Agenda 2025, and a different kind of derangement pointing to Trump as some kind of anointed Messiah figure come to save us.

I have felt the gamut of the range of human emotions. I was brought to tears at the sight of a former president on the floor with blood on his face, shocked, dismayed and irritated by the reactions to it from all sides. It was all much too much, and I was fed up, angry, and I could not for the life of me think of a single hopeful thing to write about.

This is because I know two things. I know that it doesn’t matter who gets elected. America’s economy is headed towards a dramatic crash and with it, the loss of its super power status in the world. It’s going to happen. There’s nothing Trump can do (except possibly delay it a few years), and there’s certainly nothing Biden or RFK Jr. can do about it. If my husband’s right, and I think he is, we crossed the rubicon over a hundred years ago with Woodrow Wilson and the Federal Reserve and income taxes. We’ve been offered chance after chance to reverse course since then, but we’ve never done it. In addition to all of that, we are a nation sinking under the weight of absolute moral depravity, which the Republican National Convention has decided it will adopt for its own in a bid to “broaden its political tent.” Meanwhile the blood of the millions of murdered unborn babies cries out to God from the ground, the medical waste bins, and the university laboratories where it sits puddled around the parts of babies in jars. God will answer and bring justice. He always does. Whatever form that justice takes, we will richly deserve.

In light of these facts, I knew I had to get out of my head and go touch some grass like I’m always writing about. The problem is, I can’t write and touch grass at the same time. To write is to live in one’s head. That is my lot. So, I closed my computer, got up from my seat and threw myself into a mundane household project. And I did that for two whole days.

Last month, you see, we finished an outbuilding on our property for use as an inventory room for my online clothing sales. Inventory had been gradually taking over the house and now that it was all out, I needed to move furniture around in the guest rooms so I could make the guest rooms look and feel welcoming. One of the guest rooms had been turned into a catch all inventory room and needed desperate attention. So, I had to build it from the ground up, as it were.

There was lots of pushing and pulling and shoving and lifting. There was vacuuming and dusting and hanging of shelves and sorting and arranging sheets and linens. All mundane, normal, necessary… sensible things.

I made up the bed with vintage sheets and pillow cases I pick up at thrift stores whenever I see them.

I stationed Jonathon’s epic chess board on the dresser.

Jonathon hung up a wooden shelf I found at Goodwill where I displayed some pretty vintage tablecloths and china (gifted to me or scrounged from thrift stores).

I hung up a clock my sister-in-law had handpainted for me and given to me as a Christmas present.

I hung up a cute print called “The Broken Drum.” I took one look at the made up bed and knew it needed a throw pillow. So I tromped upstairs to my sewing room, grabbed an old throw pillow I’d bought from a thrift store for just such a day as this, stripped off its old, faded pillow cover and whipped up a new one.

And by the end of the day, the chaos within had calmed to a dull roar and the chaos in my house was conquered. Doing something in the real world with my physical body helps turn down the cacophony of nonsense opinions enough so that old and prior truths can be heard again.

I am not “America First.” (I should get my husband to write a guest post for me explaining what that term actually means and what the outcome of that position entails.) Of course, I love my country and want it to thrive and not die. But…my first citizenship is not here. My citizenship is in Heaven, my first allegiance to The Kingdom of Heaven. Whether I survive or die in the coming hard times, my soul will be out of reach. Safe.

There is no more political hope for my country. Certainly not at the federal level, though we can do our best at the local level. I say this as a member of a household which has not sat on our hands or twiddled our thumbs when it comes to politics. My husband served the people of District 8 in South Carolina at the State House for eight years at great personal and financial cost. His overall health has not yet recovered from the toll. Prior to that Jonathan was a Tea Party activist and prior that, volunteered for a presidential campaign.

No, America’s hope depends entirely on the mercy of our just God. Whatever judgment He sends will not be without its mercies. So, my main duty is to be as prepared as I can be for what’s coming. And most of that preparedness will lie in doing the sensible things. Growing my real world skills, getting to know my neighbors better, building trust with them so that they can feel safe relying on me, and battening down the hatches for the coming storm.

It does not lie in hysterical social media posts, cringing and cowering in fear, or in hating either MAGA or victims of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

I asked Jonathon the other day whether sharing my favorite quotes from authors repeatedly would eventually become tiresome to my readers. He advised me to carry on sharing them, as it’s been proven that people generally need about seven exposures to a fact before it fully sinks in. So, I’m going to take his advice and once again share C.S. Lewis’ thoughts on the subject of impending doom. I shared this back in 2020 in The Panic Room when people were cleaning the stores out of toilet paper, bleach, and paper towels.

Lewis is uniquely suited to speak sense into hard times. He lived through air raid sirens and falling bombs in WW2, and before that dodged bullets, mortar fire and poisonous gas in the trenches of WW1. He said:

The first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb, when it comes, find us doing sensible and human things – praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts – not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. ~ C.S. Lewis

That’s what I intend to do for the rest of the time I have left on this earth, God help me. I hope you’ll join me.

That’s all for now. Until next time, folks…

P.S. If you enjoy reading my weekly epistle, please consider upgrading your subscription from free to paid. This will free up my time to write thoughtful and interesting things for you to read. It will also help me get my book, 27, published before the things I warn about within its covers actually happen. Thanks, all. Have a good week doing sensible things.