Daily Verse | Proverbs 29:11
A fool gives full vent to his anger, but a wise man keeps himself under control.

Monday’s Reading: Proverbs 30-31

Welcome to Monday and the last half of July. If you’ve been reading through the Bible in a year with us, we’re now more than half-way through. Congratulations and keep going!

I occasionally read Sarah Hoyt (accordingtohoyt.com) who writes sci-fi-ish or fantasy-ish books and is a political observer who contributes at Instapundit. I thought a recent column of hers was interesting in that she wrote about her personal season of burnout as a writer as a lead-in to a list of calamities that we’ve experienced over the last couple of years that may induce burnout among the citizens of this great country.

We do not expect to find ourselves under a two year house arrest at the decision of tyrants, for no reason that makes any sense. We don’t expect our kids’ education arbitrarily destroyed (not to mention what most found out about their kids education during the lockdown.) We don’t expect small businesses destroyed. We don’t expect unapologetic election fraud. We don’t expect the people who come to power that way to then do things like refuse to let our country drill for oil, or try to drive the country in the direction of technologies that don’t exist, thereby making it impossible to transport the essentials. We don’t expect to have to find ways to navigate daily life: it worked before.

I think that’s true — the majority of Americans “don’t expect” these many painful and nerve-wracking developments because they’re either ignorant of what’s happening or they’re trusting that “things” will eventually go back to what they were before (which, as I wrote on Friday, will not).

She writes, “We all know we’re heading for food and fuel shortages. We’re all watching things become more difficult. We can all predict the results,” then says:

But there is absolutely nothing we can do about it, particularly by our lonesome selves. And nothing can be done until the discontent reaches a critical mass, which, as we see from other countries, requires a whole other level of suffering, and a level of damage it will be hell to recover from.

And…. we’re powerless. It’s our lives, the lives of our kids. It’s our businesses, our communities, the careers we spent years building. It’s our ability to come and go at will, to visit friends, family. It’s our savings, our old age survival. It’s our medical care. It’s our ability to speak, to attend a demonstration, if we agree with it. It’s our ability to defend ourselves (ask the Bodega owner in NYC.) It’s plans we’d made, things we’d worked toward.

None of it is safe, all of it is in the hands of people we can’t trust, people who have other agendas than our best interests. (And far more sinister than any traditional publisher ever managed.)

And there is absolutely nothing we can do. Not yet. Not while we’re bound and delivered to our foes.

The central point she makes is that we’re powerless to change what’s happening in Washington, D.C., and in many State and city governments. I think for the most part that is true, too.

It’s very difficult to effect any kind of change even when we vote hard and then vote harder the next time. Part of it is that lasting change often takes a very long time to occur (think of the nearly 50 years it took to overturn Roe v. Wade). Conservatives are swimming upstream, like spawning salmon, against the cultural rot that exists in almost all of our national and state institutions, in our businesses, in our schools, in entertainment, in media, in many of our churches and in our local communities.

Part of it also is that we don’t have a leader who can rally the masses like Donald J. Trump did. He did in four years what hundreds of politicians didn’t do for the last forty. He did it because he’s a tough bastard who likes to give as good as he gets and didn’t let the entire system wear him down. But even if he wins four more years … it’s still only four more years.

It’s going to take more than that.

Sarah suggests five things we can do, which she details on her site:

1. Don’t lie to yourself (admit you are powerless);
2. There will be a time when you’re not powerless (be ready for post-survival);
3. Prepare by planning to survive what’s coming;
4. Keep doing life as you are now until you absolutely can’t; and
5. You won’t always be powerless (not quite a redundancy).

What I like is that she’s looking for things we can do in the face of overwhelming circumstances as an encouragement. Many of you reading this blog clearly see the state of affairs in the U.S. and wonder what can be done. I, myself, have wondered about it many times and have come up short. But Sarah’s list made me consider what else can be done as we prepare for what might be coming.

She’s right; there isn’t much we can do to stop what’s happening at the macro level. (She writes, “You want to scream at the sky. You want to stand in front of a tank. You want a grand gesture that stops the insanity.”)

But what I’m beginning to see is that there is a lot that can be done at the local level. The famous adage, “all politics is local,” means that every politician is concerned about his constituents at home. I also take it to mean that what gets offered up at the national level comes from the local level via the State. If you want to see change at the national level, then get busy at the local level.

Here’s a list of four things we can all be doing locally when it feels like we can’t do anything nationally:

1. Cultivate a life of prayer. I won’t go into any detail, but I’ve seen some remarkable answers to prayer over the last year. Not everyone who reads this blog is a believer, I’m sure, but one of the things Christ-followers have is not just the promise of prayer, but the command to pray.
   
   “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your request to God” (Philippians 4:6-7).
   
   And we are to persist in our prayers: Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. He said: “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought. And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’
   
   “For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care what people think, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually wear me out with her coming!’” (Luke 18:1-8).
   
   Prayer is simply speaking to God, by faith, and enjoining Him to intervene on our behalf. Having just read through the Psalms, it amazes me how often King David, a shepherd-turned-warrior, turned to the Lord to plead his case against his enemies. Think of prayer as a tool which God gives us and commands us to use.
   
2. Develop community in your neighborhood. We and some of our neighbors put on a second annual block party for our street this past week. As I walked around introducing myself and meeting several new people, I explained to some of them why we were doing this.
   
   Our society is going crazy and people are at each other’s throats, I said. It feels like we’re more divided than ever. Neighborhoods aren’t like they were when I was a kid, where my parents would push me out the door and say, “See you at dinner!” They’re more like communities of hermits who wave at each other as their garage doors go down or as they pass each other while cutting their lawns. By and large there aren’t the meaningful relationships that there once were, and people don’t intrinsically trust each other as they once did.
   
   We’re trying to develop those relationships again by providing a mixer and getting people introduced to each other because nobody should feel isolated, especially with the chaos that seems to be growing across our society. We need others.
   
   That can’t be done from the top down; it has to be done from the bottom up. And we’ve found that people want what we are offering. They loved getting the chance to meet their neighbors and some suggested we do it more than once a year.
   
3. Become more self-sufficient. Hoyt touches on this in her third point. We will be surprised by how dependent we are on the supply chain if it ever truly breaks. We’ve seen some signs of the strain on it when supermarket shelves were empty, when baby formula was suddenly missing.
   
   In my life I’ve never — and I mean, never — had to worry about whether food would be available. The store always had everything I needed. But now … can we rely on that?
   
   Maybe not.
   
   Becoming more self-sufficient is growing a vegetable garden or, if permitted where you live, raising some chickens for eggs. Chicks are $2 or $3 each and, once mature, each of them will lay an egg a day for about three years.
   
   Buy a generator and learn how to hook up your refrigerator to it. Build a fire pit and begin storing up wood to burn. Learn how to capture rain water and have it available for flushing toilets. Purchase food goods that have a long-term shelf date. Stock up on paper goods, like toilet paper (remember the panic buying at the start of COVID).
   
4. Arm yourself. I know guns are anathema for some, scary to others, and extreme for still others, but I’m a Second Amendment advocate and I don’t see a contradiction between being a Christian and owning a firearm.
   
   You have witnessed the increase in violence over the last several years, especially after the death of St. George Floyd. You may have to defend yourself and your family as the culture becomes more feral and our law “enforcement” declines to prosecute offenders in the name of racial justice. There’s nothing wrong with standing your ground against evil.
   
   A joke: A burglar entered the house of a Quaker and proceeded to rob it. The Quaker heard noises, took his shotgun downstairs, and found the burglar. He aimed his gun and said gently: “Friend, I mean thee no harm, but thou standest where I am about to shoot!”
   
   Seriously — buy a gun and stock up on ammo, a little at a time. Better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it. And that’s coming from a guy who ten years ago would’ve never thought it was necessary to have a firearm.

Uncle Sam is not going to save you. In fact, “Uncle Sam” is the one causing the harm. I’m as angry about it as the next guy, but I’m embracing the fact that unless there’s a massive uprising, there isn’t much we can do about it nationally. In the meantime, there are some things we can be doing on a personal, local level. Pray, develop community, become more self-sufficient, and arm yourself.

Let me know in the comments what you think.