Those Who Escape the Cult

Daniella Mestyanek Young, Uncultured

Daniella Mestyanek grew up in a Brazilian compound with dozens of other children and adults, but not really in Brazil. Her home was an international colony of the Children of God, a strange Christian splinter group notorious for its isolationism and weird sexual mores. When she finally escaped the group at age 15, she found it had warped her thinking and left her permanently vulnerable to exploitation by powerful, amoral people.

Mestyanek, who writes under her married name Young, divides this memoir into three main thematic parts. Each involves her increasing awareness of private abuse and covert violence hiding behind smiling systems. Her time with the Children of God (proper name, The Family International) is perhaps the strangest and most pointed, as it differs most remarkably from her audience’s likely experience. Yet it sets the tone for power abuses which dot her entire life.

The Children of God arose as merely one among the Jesus Freak youth ministries of the 1960s. However, the group’s leader, David Berg, like his rough contemporaries Jim Jones and David Koresh, internalized his culture’s Woodstock-era grandiosity, and believed himself a prophet. He began issuing apostolic decrees which his adherents believed carried God’s signature. His pronouncements became increasingly weird, especially when he gave God’s blessing to sexual exploitation.

Unlike comparable cults, the Children survived years without a conflagration. Because of this, not only was Daniella Mestyanek born into the religion, so was her mother; Daniella was a third-generation True Believer. Except she lacked the fervor her faith community demanded. She asked questions, demanded respect, and felt free to express her doubts—challenges which a leadership appointed by God couldn’t accept. This resulted in increasing tensions.

The problem isn’t that Family leadership believe themselves right; it’s that they believe themselves chosen by God. Such absolute leadership cannot brook doubts, questions, or challenges. The longer little Daniella defies their dictates, the more brutal and repressive their tactics become. Tactics include isolation, physical violence, and sex. But rather than force her back into line, these tactics harden Daniella’s resolve to leave.

Daniella Mestyanek Young

Once out, and forced onto her own resources at only fifteen, Mestyanek must negotiate another power dynamic that also doesn’t permit doubts: the American education system. It takes time, but she eventually learns school’s intricate, unspoken rules, even when the occasional petty dictator uses those rules against her. She achieves the book learning she always wanted, but which her religion denied, since Armageddon was always happening soon.

Her formal education, however, culminates in graduation into two new power dynamics: marriage, and joining the Army. Her first husband makes her feel included and desirable, two traits she never felt previously, notwithstanding the Family’s mandatory sexual inclusion. But she quickly realizes that he considers her a consumable resource, not a partner. The Army authorizes her to stand on her own two feet, which empowers her to escape him.

If this sounds familiar, I appreciate my long-term readers. Lauren Hough’s memoir is pointedly similar, with the arc out of the Family, and into the only organization bold enough to provide the structure she needs—in her case, the Air Force. Both women find strength enough to free themselves from learned shackles, which in Hough’s case means her closeted sexuality. But they achieve that strength only after enduring systemic abuse.

Mestyanek initially flourishes in the Army. She rises through the ranks quickly, and becomes one of America’s first women officially authorized into front-line combat. But she also quickly notices the overlap between the Army’s conditioning, and the Family’s. Both rely on name-calling, shame, and in-group behavior to enforce desirable behaviors. Both are riddled with sexual violence. And both actively squelch independent women.

This isn’t a surprise revelation; Young declares this realization early. She doesn’t, however, deeply analyze the parallels; this isn’t a scholarly monograph on cults and their organization, it’s Young’s memoir of coming to grips with patterns of power and abuse in her life. Our author becomes aware of the power structures most of us take for granted, and rebels against them. But this isn’t a how-to, it’s her life story.

As such, Young’s memoir makes for gripping reading. She struggles to maintain her identity when confronted with powers that see her, a woman, as a lesser person to exploit. Though she escapes from the unspoken rules governing life in the Family and the Army, she’s still, in the final pages, finding her own beliefs. She gives us reason to believe that we, too, can escape the exploitation dominating our lives.

The Simple Joy of Being Wrong

Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor

In elementary school, when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up—that wheezy childhood standard—I consistently answered: “A scientist.” I didn’t know what that involved, but it definitely looked cool in classic Doctor Who episodes. The Doctor collected evidence, tested hypotheses, and by Act III, he inevitably found a solution that saved humanity from itself. What could be cooler than that?

By middle school, I discovered that my giddy childhood enthusiasm didn’t match the process. Science class consisted significantly of memorizing lists, performing “skillz drillz” exercises, and satisfying state-mandated competency checklists. My brief dive into seventh grade Science Club also showed me one of science’s less-appealing aspects: fundraising. We spent most of the academic year trying to pay down debts the club ran up the previous year.

This left me profoundly discouraged. There was no messianic world-saving going on! We didn’t even stick with any program long enough to understand it. One week, we’d demonstrate the states of matter by applying heat to an ice cube until it melted, then evaporated; the next, we’d dissect a pickled frog. Our teacher, with deadlines imposed by the state Department of Education, couldn’t linger on anything enough to spark understanding.

Because of this, I lost interest in “science.” I understand, as an adult, why teachers needed to imbue students with a satisfactory corpus of knowledge, because to operate common technology and participate in modern society, I had to have a basic understanding of thermal dynamics, biology, and meteorology. But I never understood any subject better than necessary to parrot answers back on the test, and I promptly forgot everything afterward.

Science fiction usually depicts rococo science. Star Trek often implied that Spock and McCoy could pull an all-nighter to invent a vaccine and instantly stop a pandemic. Nevertheless, it conveyed that science wasn’t memorized lists and data tables, it was a systematized version of “let’s try something reckless.” But the “science” I learned in school had no reckless experimentation. Every “experiment” had a pre-ordained conclusion, and a scripted take-home lesson.

Instead, I found my long-sought experimentation and recklessness in writing and literature. Sure, every English class expected me to savvy part of the literary canon, so some prescriptive learning still happened. But in writing particularly, I could try something new, and succeed or fail on my own terms. This adolescent Shakespearean sonnet clunks badly? Heigh-ho, into the bin, and I’m already trying the next fracas!

Richard Feynman

Paul Lockhart complains that students studying math in public (state) schools never have an opportunity to be truly wrong. They never have an opportunity to face a problem, self-indulgently play with potential solutions, and ultimately find the answer themselves. Schoolbook math, in Lockhart’s view, has become desiccated and lifeless, a mere husk. “Math is not about following directions,” he writes, “it’s about making new directions.”

I often wonder how my life would’ve differed, had I discovered the unsolved, and possibly unsolvable, problems underlying scientific thought. I discovered physics at age twenty-five, in the person of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. His writings, many of them surprisingly comprehensible to outsiders, emphasize how much physics relies on metaphor, analogy, and imprecision—the fun, dangerous qualities I found in poetry.

Parenthetically, I realize that Feynman, personally, was more fraught than his mythology implied. That’s a topic for another time.

Feynman’s approach to physics was characterized by irresolution, play, and risk. Sometimes literal risk: he tested his hypothesis that a vehicle’s windscreen was sufficient to deflect the glare of a nuclear explosion by watching the Trinity test from a pickup truck’s cab. Feynman exemplified the sensory immersion of just trying something that I wanted from science, but found in literature. What if I’d discovered physics sooner?

My science teachers, dedicated educators all, nevertheless taught me that science is known and precise, and nothing is worse in classroom science than being wrong. But being wrong—stepping beyond the limits of knowledge which state contractors can write into Scantron tests—is the heart of science. And that’s what school denied me: the opportunity to experience the unmitigated joy of writing my own hypothesis, testing it, and maybe being wrong.

How many others like me exist? How many would-be historians got discouraged by pop quizzes laden with names and dates, when they’d rather discover the contingencies that made history happen? How many poets who never found their voices because somebody compared them unfairly to Robert Frost? How many people never got to just try something, and maybe be wrong?

Mr. Clean and the Home-Grown Revolution

Mr. Clean Magic Eraser

Anyone who knows me well, knows I’m a pretty poor housekeeper. My house looks exactly like an unmarried man lives alone there. This contrasts with my personal appearance, which is carefully controlled and doesn’t permit unwanted creases in my long-sleeve button-down shirts. I’ve spent much of my adult life inventing justifications for my sloppy skills, most of which reflect that my parents used housecleaning as a punishment.

But if I pause my self-serving justifications momentarily, I know that’s confusing cause and effect. My parents used cleaning as a punishment because, if they didn’t, I’d never do it. I resisted cleaning because I considered it abjectly futile. The reward for vacuuming, dusting, and scrubbing the household porcelain, was the opportunity to repeat it next week. What meaningful task, I wondered, was never truly done? What a waste of time.

A few weeks ago, though, even I, the eternal housekeeping refusenik, realized I couldn’t stand these conditions anymore. I couldn’t afford to have company over, I couldn’t cook dinner for a date, I couldn’t even invite my sister around to feed my cats and water my plants if I needed to leave town. My parents’ old household techniques of vinegar and sponges weren’t working. So I bought myself a pack of Mr. Clean Magic Eraser.

Some household dirt was months or even (I blush to admit) years old. Sponges, vinegar, all-purpose cleaner, and scouring powder all failed to remove it. Yet a Magic Eraser and some elbow grease worked wonders; dirt, soap residue, and hard water stains just rolled off. I mean literally rolled off, as it formed convenient little pills which I rinsed with water and watched flush down the drain. Years of dirt, gone.

Without exaggeration, I’d forgotten that my bathtub was originally white, not ecru. I’d also forgotten that my shower spigot was shiny chrome, not dingy lime-scale. These scrubbers peeled off not only my dirt, but some that, I’m sure, lingered from my home’s previous tenants. But these scrubbers didn’t just uncover dirt, they uncovered something deeper: my sense of pride in keeping my own house.

Like many members of their class and generation, my parents didn’t see cleaning as just cleaning; they considered it a moral expression. People who didn’t maintain their houses were inherently bad people. “Nobody,” I recall my father saying while driving the family through a notoriously run-down neighborhood in a major city, “is ever too poor to clean their yards and wash their windows.” Slovenly people were clearly moral reprobates.

Spot which part of this faucet was cleaned with a Magic Eraser and dried overnight

I was more conservative then, but even I realized this was, at some level, fallacious. Even if they’re married, poor couples often work three or more jobs between them to cover rent, groceries, childcare, and utilities. Telling overworked, underpaid people that further household busywork makes the difference between moral and immoral people, is a massive class-based imposition. My father’s unspoken message was: “Shut up and act White.”

What arrogance! In a world wracked by poverty, violence, and structural injustice, my father wanted poor people to abandon social solidarity, and instead organize their own lawns. I was too young, White, and conservative to explain it in those terms, but that encapsulates the underlying thought. White, middle-class demands for household cleanliness were, and are, demands for atomized individualism in the face of organized injustice.

In a society organized so unfairly that one in eight American children faces chronic hunger, housecleaning seemed like a retreat from the conflict. This tendency was compounded because, like many suburban White kids, very few people outside my family ever saw the inside of my house. As I became increasingly conscious of America’s ingrained injustices, cleaning seemed increasingly self-indulgent and luxurious.

Yet, watching old dirt form pills and rinse down the drain, I realized: keeping my own house is part of participating in the community. I cannot invite fellow reformists to my house to plan and organize, or even to share common meals and a beer, if I don’t have a bathroom I’m willing to let others see. Solidarity is always public-facing and vocal, yes, but true community solidarity starts at home.

This change is new. I’m still feverishly cleaning old, stained surfaces, wearing out Magic Erasers like there’s no tomorrow. Yet I do it because, for the first time in years, I’m starting to feel proud of my house. I’m starting to feel like I can invite people around and let them see the place where I live. I’m starting to see that housecleaning isn’t injustice or punishment, it’s home.

Corporal Punishment, the Church, and Me

My defining moment in the Amazon documentary miniseries Shiny Happy People happens about midway through the second episode. An invited speaker at an Institute for Basic Life Principles (IBLP) seminar invites a child volunteer onstage to demonstrate the speaker’s precepts of Biblically appropriate spanking. The child was volunteered by his parents, not of his own volition, and never speaks or is even identified by name onstage.

The speaker (who shall remain nameless here) takes the child volunteer over his knee and pantomimes the spanking incident, backed with a monologue about how the misbehaving child simply needs discipline to grow with God. Because the speaker mimes the spanking so gently, the effect appears downright predatory. This appearance isn’t helped when, upon letting the child rise, the speaker demands a hug from the kid he just finished disciplining.

Back in the 1990s, I attended a United Methodist congregation in a small Nebraska town. For those unfamiliar with Protestant denominationalism, the Methodist tradition doesn’t have even a shirt-tail theological relationship with most American Evangelical or Fundamentalist churches. Most such churches are theologically Five-Point Calvinist, while Methodism descends from Arminianism, a deliberate rejection of Calvinist absolutism. Methodism shouldn’t be compatible with Evangelicalism.

Yet much of White American Christianity in the 1980s and 1990s trended toward Calvinist conservatism. Pushed by the ideological bloc of Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell, many White Christians yearned for the doctrinal certainty which Evangelicals seemingly enjoyed. Congregations which had no theological truck with Five-Point Calvinism snapped up books by Tim LaHaye, Charles Swindoll, and Francis Schaeffer. Their theology soon bled into regular worship and teaching.

As the pro-spanking speaker finishes his ganked, almost fetishistic mock spanking, he demands a hug from his volunteer. But he immediately rejects the hug he receives, declaring it insufficiently enthusiastic. He replaces the kid across his knee and resumes the spanking. This repeats a pattern, perhaps unknowingly, visible in Christian thinkers since at least Augustine: that if you’re sufficiently righteous, you can threaten children into loving God, and you too.

My small Nebraska congregation brought a local pastor aboard who, as part of his ministry, demanded the congregational council hire his son as youth and young adult minister. The son was highly charismatic, and quickly gained acclaim among his intended young parishioners. He introduced a rock concert-influenced evening worship service, and accordingly, local Christians treated him like a rock star. Eventually, he seemed to start believing it himself.

Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar became the celebrity face of Bill Gothard's IBLP

I wanted to believe it, too. In my early twenties, I was considerably more conservative and doctrinaire than I am now, both politically and theologically. This father-and-son team verified that my primarily emotional spirituality was justified. But before long, I realized they didn’t treat everyone equally. They wanted congregants who were extroverted, but submissive. Those who conformed received preferential treatment; everyone else watched from outside, confused and scared.

Don’t misunderstand, my desire to separate wasn’t a Daniel-like stand on morality. I was simply lonely. The ministry focused on highly demonstrative episodes, “mountaintop moments,” and gregariousness; it left no opportunity for thoughtful contemplation, much less deep discussion performed in our “indoor voices.” I attempted to peel myself off simply because I needed time to catch my breath, while their ministry was breathless, breakneck, and quick.

My only mistake came in trying to announce my separation. Instead of just quietly not showing up—as an increasing number of the congregation’s introverted members started doing—I attempted to make my polite apologies before going. The youth minister responded by angrily deploying a laundry list of “sacrifices” he’d made to support his “ministry.” The list rambled on, voluble and extensive, until I finally relented just to escape the situation.

I’ve seldom faced literal violence in my life. I realize how privileged I am to even say that, but I haven’t faced state repression, violent crime, or relationship abuse. Even given my frequently adversarial relationship with my father, he seldom spanked me; he reserved corporal punishment for extreme circumstances, and discontinued it early. Therefore, until I saw a self-righteous spanking enacted onscreen, I didn’t make the connection to what happened that day.

But on a key level, when leaders believe themselves appointed by God, they start demanding love. They demand obedience and adherence from those beneath them. Some enforce those demands through violence, while others enforce them through guilt and shame. But in both cases, they believe they have God-given authority to make demands. Listening, learning, and adapting are for lesser people. Leaders make demands, and the first demand is for love.

One Man's Walk Through Armageddon

Zack Hunt, Unraptured: How End Times Theology Gets It Wrong

You ever notice how it seems some people really, really want the world to end a week from next Tuesday? Pastor Zack Hunt used to be one of them. A youth spent studying end-times theology convinced him that Jesus would return promptly, if you read the signs. He admits having been one of those eschatological enthusiasts who steered every discussion to Christ’s imminent return. And he apologizes for that.

This book is half memoir, half deep-dive into Biblical literacy. Pastor Hunt unpacks the moral certainties that defined his youth, and the growing complexity that forced him to amend his beliefs. For a time, he apparently questioned whether he could remain a Christian without the absolute conviction of end-times theology. It took time and growth before Pastor Hunt realized faith is about the here and now, not the great hereafter.

Starting in his teenage years, Hunt found himself torn between two religious extremes. He grew up in the Church of the Nazarene, part of the Holiness tradition in American Christianity, a faith that requires “total sanctification.” In theory, this means that relationship with Jesus makes your soul as spotless as new Victorian lace. In practice, it often means that you spend your life tallying your own sins to make sure you haven’t strayed from God’s path. Hunt describes himself answering lots of altar calls and getting saved every Sunday.

Such constant soul scrutiny led, Hunt describes, to embracing a theology of vindication. The end-times eschatology described by theologians like Hal Lindsay and Tim LaHaye let Hunt rest calmly on the expectation that, when Jesus returns quickly, He’ll exonerate the righteous. In order to “win,” he needed only to memorize the right prooftexts, perform the prescribed rituals, and evangelize to anyone and everyone.

Hunt walks us through his spiritual journey, one he admits remains incomplete. Like many young Christians, he accepted his parents’ religion, not only without question, but also without restraint. He became a more absolute, more performative version of whatever his parents told him to believe, to the point where, in his telling, his own pastors and spiritual mentors rolled their eyes at his extreme certainties.

Zack Hunt

His encounters with Scripture as a young adult, however, forced him into impossible situations. He attended college to become a “youth pastor,” a title often associated with the worst excesses of populist Christianity. But his exegetical professors and Bible mentors showed him a scriptural reading that didn’t accord with his moral absolutes. He found himself backed into a corner: change his beliefs, or admit he favored preachers over Christ.

Although Hunt does use extensive personal narrative, and centers his own spiritual journey, he doesn’t pooh-pooh scholarship. He quotes extensively from prior theologians on topics like eschatology, exegesis, and homiletics. Augustine and Origen, C.S. Lewis and Barbara Rossing, all serve to bolster Hunt’s position. He passed through his crisis of faith and became a pastor, obviously, bringing all the scholarship that title implies.

But simultaneously, he realizes most people don’t believe in end-times theology for scholarly, scriptural purposes. They believe because it satisfies a need in their personal spiritual journey. Facts seldom persuade people from their religious or philosophical beliefs; if they did, most people would be paralyzed by the doubt stemming from conflicting facts and moral ambiguity. True Believers need a vision, and that’s what Hunt’s memoir provides.

As an adult, Hunt basically believes that end-times theology provides adherents a fast pass out of life. By believing the world will end soon, and one’s only solution is to individually get right with God, Left Behind readers are exempted from boring old requirements to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. Why band together to relieve this world’s suffering, when this world won’t exist next week?

Jesus Christ, though, doesn’t support this position. Hunt notes that Jesus ties the Parable of the Sheep and Goats to his “Little Apocalypse,” his only direct end-times narrative. Jesus’ own explication of how to face the eschaton directly ties to how we live this life. Salvation, Hunt writes as an adult, isn’t an escape from this life. It’s a new life, a new kingdom, a new way of living in this physical world.

Not everyone will appreciate such conclusions. Hunt admits his teenage self would’ve hated them. But they’re no less real despite some believers’ resistance. Salvation and grace, Hunt believes now, are about being more fully alive right now. And we can’t find that, Hunt now insists, by fleeing from the real and messy life God gave us.

 

See also: The End Is Nigh (Again)

Reality Has a Lousy Plot and a Slovenly Editor

There was no thunder and lightning the day my mother fell and injured herself, which, as a writer, I found anticlimactic and disappointing. We writers are always taught that we need appropriate foreshadowing before a big plot event, but life isn’t so obliging. My mother’s injury—a frustrating reversal of all the progress she’s made in a year of physical therapy—wasn’t heralded by meaningful story elements. It just happened.

It was Easter Sunday, April 9th, 2023. She was headed to church, where her daughter, my sister, was scheduled to play with the bell choir; my sister’s music has made her a small-time local celebrity. Mom stepped out of the truck, something that would’ve been impossible for her a year ago as her joints were becoming increasingly brittle, but which she’s been handling with grace and ease, supported by only a telescoping trekking pole.

There was no pavement crack to trip over, no surging crowd pushing her back. Nothing in the plot to justify her falling backwards. She simply lost her balance and fell against the truck’s bumper with sufficient force to break three ribs, one pretty severely. Lying on the emergency room gurney later, she wracked her brain for explanations why she fell so suddenly, but explanations weren’t forthcoming. It just happened.

In writing, as in other mass-media arts—filmmaking, game design—storytellers need justifications for life-altering events. If somebody falls, shattering bones and becoming paralyzed, we need somebody to first portentously say, “Y’all better fix that sidewalk before someone gets hurt.” Because in storytelling, we recognize the existence of a storyteller. There’s a genuine person present, making decisions, and those decisions need support.

Roland Barthes called this tendency to value the author’s choices “theological.” Centering the storyteller’s choices too closely resembled looking for God’s mission in life, and like many mid-20th Century French academics, Barthes pooh-poohed the idea of a personal God. But Barthes replaced the storyteller’s choices for those of the audience. He disparaged theology, while arrogating theological power to the reader. This, to him, seemed a reasonable trade.

Roland Barthes

Thus, even as the literary world has moved away from its belief in a just and ordered universe, it nevertheless persists in believing in human agency. Whether we believe that God ordained universal values, or humans make values where we find them, we still look for an orderly world, because we recognize that there’s a storyteller and an audience, and both of them make choices.

Early novelists believed that, because they were making choices in writing, they needed to have a moral thrust. Before the Twentieth Century, the novel’s denouement needed to reward the virtuous and punish the culpable. Moving into the modern era, novelists increasingly recognized that the universe is seldom so just, and made their stories reflect this change. But they often followed the opposite extreme, visiting sadistic cruelty on the innocent.

Modern audiences have become savvy to these authorial choices. We recognize that authors are either moralistically pious, or nihilistically savage, and instead of traveling where the storyteller takes us, we often start the book, movie, or game by looking for clues. We don’t want to undertake a journey, we want to “beat the game,” anticipating whatever twist or convoluted conspiracy we assume the author has buried in the story.

Then we act surprised when some people seek those same clues in the outside world. QAnon cultists and Flat Earthers look for fiddling, insignificant signs of an organized universe in frivolous word choices or inconsistencies in flight plans. They’re engaged in a pattern Barthes would disparage as “theological,” looking for concealed truths of an underlying storyteller making choices. And their behavior is every bit as silly.

As Christian as I am, I can’t help laughing at people looking for God (or a God analogue) in worldly clues. It’s about as nonsensical as making offerings to Babylonian water spirits to propitiate the rain and create a bountiful harvest. Even if you believe that God exists, faith doesn’t exist to ballyhoo evidence in the past; that’s arrogant and self-justifying. Faith doesn’t justify the past, it helps you make the next right choice in the present.

My mother’s injury is a frustrating, disappointing setback and loss of progress. But it wasn’t foreshadowed, because reality isn’t a story. Maybe there’s a God, but that doesn’t mean every life event represents a choice. Sometimes things happen because they happen, and humanity’s vainglorious tendency to look for purpose is ultimately disappointing. For us writers, that’s a very bitter pill to swallow.

The Truth About America’s Rural Poor

Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

Sarah Smarsh has no patience with bromides about how honest and simple America’s poor rural core might be. Born a fifth-generation farmer outside Wichita, Kansas, she faced the rootlessness and despair which poverty generates among America’s working classes. Far from Norman Rockwell simplicity, she faced a childhood buffeted by falling crop prices, inability to own anything, and transience. She attended over a dozen schools before twelfth grade.

The product, Smarsh writes, isn’t the picturesque rural ideal beloved by political campaigns and Frank Capra movies. She describes a childhood dominated by banalities, driven by despair. She watched her very young parents build their own house, then lose everything to natural disasters and exploitation. Her construction worker father lost his livelihood when rising interest rates wrecked his industry. Meanwhile, her mother, a farmer, barely  survived the 1980s Farm Crisis.

Smarsh structures her book as an open letter to the daughter she never had. She came from several generations of women who got pregnant as teenagers, and who went through several spouses because society deemed marriage necessary, even when the marriage was palpably harmful. Smarsh grew up conscious that such could happen to her, too, and she planned for the eventuality of winding up with a mouth she was too poor and young to feed.

She describes a childhood surrounded by powerful women who wouldn’t break under life’s pressures. Women like Grandma Betty, who survived several violent husbands and her own mother’s schizophrenia diagnosis to become Wichita’s most competent and respected parole officer. Or her mother, Jeannie, who persevered under intense pressure and lost everything anyway, yet somehow increasingly believed Reagan-era bootstrap mythology.

Smarsh’s narrative moves from the personal to the global, and back again. Her storytelling heart stays closest to her Kansas upbringing, and her family’s voluble storytelling traditions. She reconstructs not only her own life, but the lives of the women around her, lives characterized by big dreams and small, persistent disappointments. The women around Smarsh scarcely move forward before somebody, usually a man, often a husband, kicks down the ladder.

Sarah Smarsh

Poverty, Smarsh asserts, doesn’t just inexplicably happen; it comes from powerful people making deliberate choices. After the American government subsidized rapid expansion through the Homestead Act and land-grant colleges (freely distributing land the federal government had stolen honestly), it abandoned the rural population by shifting to urban industrialization, then to suburban single-family home ownership. At each stage, the government abandoned populations it once actively supported, letting farmers and urban cores rot.

Throughout, Smarsh finds ways to retain her dreams. Schools deem her academically “gifted,” though that means little when she transfers frequently while her parents hunt for employment. She’s particularly talented at public speaking. Most important, she alone among the women around her doesn’t have an abusive father or husband. Her father, Nick, and step-grandfather, Arnie, give her stability that her grandmothers, cousins, and other kinfolk lack.

She also has August, the name she selected for her future daughter. Smarsh describes her increasingly direct relationship with the daughter she never had, asking herself when faced with difficult choices or powerful temptations, what would I recommend to August? This gives her a long-term perspective which her relatives, beset by hunger and abuse, couldn’t afford. Smarsh occasionally addresses August directly, in the second person, grateful for the steadfastness.

I recognize some of myself in Smarsh, but less than I’d expected. We’re close in age, and for much of her Kansas childhood, I lived nearby, in Nebraska. But some aspects don’t jibe altogether. She describes adults encouraging her to leave the homestead and pursue a life of urbanized upward mobility. As the Farm Crisis decimates American small towns, Smarsh writes, nobody dreamed of bequeathing the farm to their children.

Really? Hitting early adulthood in Nebraska, I remember being explicitly told that desiring to leave the state or aspire to employment beyond hourly wage-earning was dishonest. State legislators perform massive economic contortions to keep homesteads in their respective families. Maybe it’s because I was geographically stationary in ways Smarsh wasn’t, but my experience with place and rootedness appears to have been very different from hers.

Despite this, Smarsh tells her story well. Rural simplicity, often extolled by political candidates and big-city nostalgia merchants, Smarsh identifies as simply the choices necessary to get by. Hard work isn’t ennobling, and is often degrading, especially as billionaires cannibalize rural communities for parts. Smarsh asserts that poor, rural “virtues” aren’t heroic qualities. They’re the tricks and techniques poor people use to survive, often despite the world around them.

Living in the Shadow of a Garbage Society

My mother loves telling this story: one Sunday when I was perhaps four or five, the pastor asked the assembled children what jobs they wanted when they grew up. I reportedly announced into a live microphone: “I want to be a garbageman!” Once the laughter subsided, the pastor asked why I’d aspire to such a job. “I want a job that helps people,” I supposedly said, “and garbagemen help people by removing their trash!”

It’s easy, from an adult perspective, to laugh at the childlike logic implicit in that statement. Lord knows I do. But revisiting that child’s reasoning, I really appreciate the underlying reasoning. It reflects the precepts of mutualism, responsibility, and trust which underlie a working society: when somebody has a problem, and I have the capacity to alleviate that burden, I arguably have a moral responsibility to do so.

That responsibility underlies traditional moral paradigms like The Good Samaritan. It isn’t enough to feel sympathy for that broken body lying beside the road; the Samaritan must lift the bloodied man onto his donkey, transport him to safety, and purchase the care that man requires. I must solve another’s burden by taking it onto myself physically. I must throw others’ garbage into the truck before it can be removed.

Considering this raises another question, though: does that really help? When faced with an acute situation, I can assume the other’s burdens temporarily, sure. I can remove their accumulated store of garbage. How many times can I do this, though, before finally looking into why their household produces so much trash? Eventually I must acknowledge that removing and landfilling their garbage permits them to keep producing trash, and that’s a problem.

Don’t misunderstand me. I know and appreciate the helping motivation. Though I never became a garbageman, I stuck with teaching despite the dismal pay and no advancement opportunities because I believed I was doing good. But I remember, multiple times, walking students through the academic process and realizing I could do nothing for them, because they’d been abandoned by parents, academia, capitalism, and modern society years earlier.

A Sunday School illustration of the
Good Samaritan. Click to enlarge.

Most people probably don’t produce massive quantities of household garbage from malice or negligence. But they’re pressed for time, lacking resources, and have material needs. I doubt most people would purchase the things they’re most likely to throw away—flimsy clothing, food packaging, and countless stacks of paper—if they didn’t have an unjust system requiring them to buy food, clothes, and everything else at unequal terms.

It’s tempting to believe we can take others’ suffering away without taking it on ourselves. And sometimes, certainly, we can; it’s possible, sometimes, to simply remove and discard others’ suffering, But not very often. The garbageman, in removing others’ refuse, must first lift and throw it himself, and even when the waste is removed and landfilled, the reek of garbage, literal and metaphorical, never entirely washes off.

Please forgive the overextended garbage metaphor. My point remains: I can help people by assuming their burdens, by removing the detritus that life forces them to produce, and by trying, however ham-handedly, to heal their wounds. Or I can help by finding the reasons why they’re forced to be wasteful, hurting, and generally disadvantaged. I can fix their problems when they’re acute, or before they even become problems.

Unfortunately, we’ve accepted that only helping individuals when their problem is acute actually counts as helping. Addressing the injustice that creates acute problems is routinely dismissed as “political,” disdained as partisan interference. Recall the Brazilian archbishop Dom Helder Camara’s famous quote: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”

The conditions that filled people’s lives with garbage, however, weren’t apolitical. Our economics, shared values, and hierarchies didn’t just happen, despite the libertarian myth; these conditions are created and reinforced by legal systems. As conservatives like reminding us whenever America’s southern border returns to mass consciousness, “we’re a society of laws.” That doesn’t just mean to shut up and obey, it means laws, written and unwritten, create society.

So yes, in short, I could help people by removing the trash their modern lives force them to accumulate. I could martyr myself by accepting the moral judgment and pervasive physical reek that come with being a garbageman. Or I can rise up against a system that encourages people to hoard things and create waste. The latter is more disdained, but much more effective.

Modern Life, and the False Yearning For “Inspiration”

Like many writers, I have wasted countless hours staring at blank pages or flickering screens, waiting for inspiration to overcome me. All writers know this doesn’t work. Though most of us can recount the occasional moment of overwhelming afflatus, when an idea emerges fully formed and we run with it, these are the outliers. Usually, inspiration only happens after the creative act begins: we become inspired after, not before, we write.

I discovered years ago that, to make that supposed magic of inspiration happen, I simply needed to start writing. I set a ten-minute timer, force myself to type with the urgency of a prisoner writing his confession, and somewhere around minute seven or eight, I surprise myself by discovering whatever hidden message I secretly wanted to write all along. I know this, I’ve “discovered” it several times. Yet I keep forgetting, and needing to relearn this important lesson.

How many of us, I wonder, spend our lives wandering largely aimlessly, waiting for inspiration to overtake us? Waiting for God, the universe, or the shared unconscious to speak some message we need, and provide our lives direction? When I watch people trudging through jobs that pay well, but provide no larger satisfaction, or sticking with hobbies, relationships, religions, and other activities they clearly hate, this question always emerges again.

Wandering is a useful activity, I’ll acknowledge. Elijah, the Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed all needed to spend time wandering, searching for that higher message they’d eventually bring back to the nations. An entire world religion, Taoism, is dedicated to attentive wandering, to finding one’s place by encountering new experiences without a schedule. So I never want anyone to accuse me of disparaging the act of wandering.

However, there’s a difference between wandering purposefully, with an attentive mind seeking answers, and traipsing aimlessly through life, hoping something might emerge, fully formed, and give our lives meaning. Modernity has stripped most people of purpose, whether they find that purpose through religion— which continues retreating from daily life— or through worldly pursuits like work, which is increasingly automated. We meander, today, because there’s no destination left.

In my childhood, my parents told me writing wasn’t a pursuit for grown-ups. Most people who aim to become writers flail about and never make a profit, they warned me; so act like a responsible adult and learn a trade. Because they provided no guidance in finding a trade, but also no support in becoming an artist, I became neither. Though I think I’m a pretty good writer, I’ve never made my bones in the field, because I never learned the business aspects of art.

(Full disclosure, my parents eventually reversed themselves and said I was a natural-born artist, and should pursue that. But not until I was nearly forty, and my habits had calcified.)

From a political perspective, progressives and leftists like speaking of systems. You’ll hear them harping relentlessly on systemic racism, systemic poverty, systemic injustice, and the systemic kitchen sink. Conservatives condemn them for this, using the language of individualism and autonomy, but their actual policies swap systems for hierarchies, and urge everyone to find their place on the pyramid. Systems or hierarchies: either way, shut up and comply.

I could continue listing ways modernity fails us. Education, by dividing life into discrete subjects, separates art from business, philosophy from science, and pits these disciplines in gladiatorial combat. Therefore too many aspiring artists never learn the fiduciary responsibilities of art-making, while, as we learned in 2008, too many business professionals overlook the human aspects of finance. Then artists and economists both crash.

As in writing, life doesn’t provide ready-made inspiration. Jesus didn’t promise anyone salvation through abstract belief; he told believers: “Go, and do likewise.” We can give mental assent to anything: I’m going to love my neighbor. I’m going to write this book. I’m going to start my business. But until we do, it doesn’t matter. Our brains respond to the stimuli we give them; we change our brains, and arguably our souls, in the doing, not the rumination.

How many people, I wonder, march through somebody else’s life script, hoping that inspiration will emerge? More than a few, surely, and that includes me. But in life, as in writing, inspiration comes second. We live first, with the mistakes and the uncertainty which life entails, then inspiration follows: clarity and insight emerge from what seems, at first, like chaos. Inspiration isn’t a fully formed idea; it’s the moment we see patterns in life’s mess.

Leaving the Church of St. Robert E. Lee

Ty Seidule, Robert E. Lee and Me: a Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause

Imagine a young White boy, raised practically in the shadow of Robert E. Lee’s antebellum mansion. He attends Robert E. Lee Elementary School, and later, Washington & Lee University. He learns to read with illustrated Lee biographies, and shouts the “rebel yell” when his football team scores a touchdown. His entire childhood is suffused with Lost Cause mythology. Only as an adult does he think to wonder: “Why?”

Ty Seidule, a former West Point history professor, gained fame for a 2015 PragerU video speaking the uncomfortable truth: the Civil War was about slavery, nothing else. He claims this video earned him hate mail, even death threats. This baffled him, since he provided documentary evidence (something usually missing at PragerU). His wife pointed out that facts are frequently ancillary, and he needed to share his own intellectual journey.

This book represents Seidule’s journey out of Lost Cause mythopoesis. (I’m unsure what title to call Seidule. Mister? Professor? Colonel, his rank in the PragerU video, or Brigadier General, his rank at retirement?) Readers seeking a thorough history of the Civil War and its aftermath shouldn’t expect that here. Instead, it’s Colonel Seidule’s intellectual autobiography, describing how he gradually shed beliefs he once held deeply.

Seidule describes growing up in Alexandria, Virginia, and Monroe, Georgia, both cities deeply entrenched in racist myth-making. His schools presented a polished, morally cleansed version of history, where Lee represented the paragon of American virtue— Seidule uses the words “Christian gentleman” extensively— and Jim Crow wasn’t that bad overall. He didn’t just believe a sanitized history; adults around him willfully peddled that history, usually for clearly defined purposes.

The outline of Seidule’s narrative unfolds broadly sequentially, but the facts don’t. His adult self, with an officer’s epaulets and a doctorate in American History, frequently intrudes upon his reminiscence of a sheltered childhood. Seidule realizes now, as he couldn’t then, that he marinated in racist mythology, and his education was unofficially segregated; he scarcely knew any Black people until adulthood. It isn’t his fault, but it’s definitely his responsibility.

Ty Seidule, U.S. Army (ret.)

Moving into his collegiate years at what he half-affectionately calls “W&L,” the mythology Seidule internalized crosses a line. Though he doesn’t recognize it then, his college is a religious pilgrimage site, with Lee’s remains entombed beneath the chapel, his office preserved as a holy site for viewing, and his image engraved upon the chapel altar. Beginning in this chapter, he describes the Lost Cause narrative as explicitly religious.

The word he uses, though, is “cult.”

Throughout the narrative, Seidule uses Lee as a synecdoche for the Civil War, the Lost Cause hooey, and White Supremacy generally. Sometimes, as when discussing the arcane processes that got ten permanent Army bases named for Confederate officers, he addresses the war in larger terms, and moves away from individuals. Other times he focuses specifically on Lee, and the choices Lee made that steered the war and its aftermath.

Only well into adulthood, when he stands wondering at the number of Robert E. Lee memorials on West Point’s campus, does Seidule have what he calls his “aha moment.” He already had his doctorate, and had commanded troops in combat, before he reinvented himself as a Lee scholar. Once he realizes how deeply the Lee myth permeates, however, Seidule can’t stop seeing what he deems a false history wherever he goes.

Please understand, though Seidule is a respected scholar and textbook author, he doesn’t pretend to maintain scholarly neutrality. This story recounts Seidule’s encounters with Lee’s myth, and Lee’s written record. His purposes are unambiguously political. As Seidule writes: “Americans have a duty to better understand military history so they can hold their military and political leaders accountable.”

In his concluding pages, Seidule becomes demonstratively emotional. He describes how the Army has defined his adult life and continues molding his values even in retirement. Robert E. Lee abandoned the pledges he made as a soldier, Seidule contends, and did so for morally repugnant reasons. For him, there’s no coming back from the disfigured reputation of fighting for the slave republic. Once a Lee worshiper, Seidule now offers no forgiveness.

Seidule’s language is frequently emotional, always pointed. For him, this isn’t just American history or Lee’s biography. Seidule believed a mythology he now disavows altogether, and that brings his feelings to the forefront. Fundamentally, this is Seidule’s intellectual memoir, not a history, and he invites us to share his journey. It’s one that many readers have already made ourselves, and hopefully, others will willingly make soon too.

Fear of Being Wrong

“Is it worse,” my distant acquaintance asked, “to fail at something or never attempt it in the first case?” I felt convicted by the question, because I’m frequently guilty of punting indefinitely on trying new and important actions. I have countless unfinished art projects, so many manuscripts waiting for my hand to complete them, so many tools I’ve purchased but never used, because on some level, failure is a terrible consequence. Something to avoid at all costs.

We avoid attempting things because, in the near term, failure is the worse consequence. But, because failures are often the building blocks of success, in the long term, avoiding the attempt is worse. So I guess it depends on your perspective.

— Kevin L Nenstiel (@KLNenstiel) May 16, 2022

It’s easy to rationalize this outcome. It’s downright cliché to laugh about former “gifted” children who translate into frustrated, timid adults. Even Malcolm Gladwell writes that people deemed “geniuses” by our academic establishment only sometimes live up to their potential; great success in life and career tends to follow those who face obstacles, not those to whom school comes easy. We former “gifted” kids become averse to setbacks.

But I feel something more particular occurring here. Something closer to my spiritual core. As stated in my response to my acquaintance’s question, avoiding trying something means protecting myself from the disgrace of being wrong. It’s much harder to determine where I acquired this paralyzing fear of being wrong, and therefore, it’s much harder to shake the fear and progress into being able to accomplish goals without fear of judgment.

Sometimes I fall into the temptation of blaming outside forces. That temptation is easy because it isn’t entirely wrong. Teachers correct students’ mistakes in crowded classrooms, in front of peers eager to leap on weakened classmate like leopards on a wounded gazelle. As Dana Goldstein writes, American-style classroom learning is cost-effective, but not necessarily pedagogically effective. Therefore teacher-blaming is tempting, if facile.

I also sometimes recall my father’s instructional technique of public callouts. He loved correcting me in front of friends and family for every minor mistake. As a teenager, I became reluctant to do anything with him until after I’d thoroughly mastered all relevant skills, for fear of public callouts. This behavior was also gendered: he regularly called me out in front of women, but never corrected my sister similarly. I suspect he thought this toughened me up.

But these explanations are unsatisfying. Classroom embarrassment and public callouts are techniques as old as formalized education, and many people emerge unscathed. The problem isn’t that these things happened, it’s my reaction to them. Instead of learning to accept these behaviors as events that ordinarily happen, I internalized them, made them part of my identity. My life’s purpose became not accomplishing goals, but avoiding being wrong.

Perhaps it’s because I was able to read at an unusually early age. Because I’d already spent years reading recreationally before beginning grade school, I talked in complete sentences and with adult grammar. This, combined with my being unusually tall, possibly made adult authority figures mistake me for older than I really was, an expectation I then tried to live up to, acting adult and well-informed before giving myself permission to be young and make mistakes.

Except oops, there I go again, blaming others.

Whatever the reason, from an early age, I learned to associate being wrong with losing face. Getting corrected wasn’t an opportunity to improve in the future, it was always read as a callout for being wrong in the past. Therefore I became invested, not in improving my upcoming responses, but in defending my previous errors. And the surest way to avoid wasting time on old errors, was to ensure I never committed them.

This fear isn’t entirely unjustified. We’ve all known somebody who becomes deeply invested in some esoteric pursuit that others don’t understand, and becomes exceptionally good at it: hard science, for instance, or art. The crowds often handle these people by mocking them. Not only for being quirky “nerds” in their learning, but also, even especially, when they become accomplished and bank everything on wrong ideas. Remember cold fusion?

In other words, we treat those who are wrong as having wasted their lives. We subject them to ridicule, tearing down whatever accomplishments they actually achieved to justify shaming their mistakes. The gifted few are immune to such judgments, shrugging off mistakes as learning opportunities for future learning. But that wasn’t me; I cared what others thought. I learned instead to avoid being judged by avoiding being wrong.

I’m still deciding where to go from here. Reaching this point hasn’t given me insights into correcting this trend. But by naming the effect, by explaining why being wrong hurts, maybe I can plan my next steps.

Children Building Cities out of Sand

Stock photo

We quickly learned how to find a place on the playground’s perimeter, the six of us, where we could build our cities made of sand. We were all in fifth and sixth grade, at a standard prefab elementary school in Southern California, one of countless identical schools in countless identical suburbs erected hastily in the building boom of the 1970s and early 1980s. But we built the cities we wanted to live in.

The playground sand was dry and granular, basically low-density road gravel, not suitable for building. That didn’t stop us. We swept it down to create a level surface, and marked out roads. Then we scooped up double-handfuls of sand and began building our elaborate urban arcologies: massive arenas for stout-hearted competitions, for instance, or grand halls for universities or laboratories or kings. Our cities were vast places of epic architecture.

We weren’t building cities, of course. We were building stories. We built the kinds of metropolises we wanted to occupy, cities designed to inspire awe and motivation. All our roads were majestic boulevards; all our buildings were vast palaces of art, science, and leadership. Utopian cities of great aspiration, where somehow, the fiddling business of cities—sewage removal and building maintenance, for instance—happened automatically, outside the story.

Nobody outside our group wanted us doing this, of course. Though we were within the playground fence, adults frequently scolded us for getting literally as far from the classroom buildings as rules permitted. They cited fatuous claims that maybe we wouldn’t hear the bell summoning us back to class, or kidnappers might leap the fence and abscond with us before adults could intervene. Don’t you want, they asked, to play over here with the other kids?

I don’t blame those teachers. Given what I now know about liability insurance and bad PR in the years following the Adam Walsh case, they were bombarded with demands to keep students safe no matter what. They meant well. They just couldn’t comprehend that the places they wanted us to play, and the games they encouraged, were noisy, crowded, and hectic. We didn’t want to run around; we wanted to build and tell stories.

I have considerably less sympathy for the other kids. Frequently, if adults didn’t compel us to abandon our stories and play “accepted” games among the crowds, other students would find ways to thwart our inventions. Sometimes they’d outright lie, claiming adults had summoned us back, with threats of punishment. Other times they just ran through our cityscapes, dragging their feet and making the maximum mess possible.

Didn’t matter much. Either way, we saw bigger kids maliciously destroy our cities, our stories.

We learned, as a result, to dream and tell stories surreptitiously. We continued building our science-fictional cities, but learned to keep one eye out for interference. Whether it came from well-meaning authority figures, or mean-spirited peers who got pleasure from destroying what we’d built, interference was always present at the margins. If our aspirations became too independent, well, then we aspired illicitly.

As a grade schooler, I enjoyed academic subjects, but I didn’t necessarily enjoy them at officially approved times. Schools have designated times to read and write, perform math or science, and the omnipresent phys-ed. Having spent time teaching myself, I understand the importance of having everybody working on the same wavelength simultaneously. In chronically short-staffed, cash-poor schools, independent learning wasn’t much of an option.

But I wanted to write when I wrote, not when my well-meaning teacher said writing was appropriate. I invented elaborate stories for myself involving math, far more interesting than the “skillz drillz” practiced in the textbooks. The approach advocated in textbooks worked, insofar as kids learned basic skills sufficiently to ace standardized tests. But only when allowed to play with words and numbers like toys, was I able to care enough to actually master the concepts.

Our sandcastle cities were the manifestation of this principle. We learned collaboration by building the cities together. We learned math by determining how high we could stack unstable playground sand to make our cathedrals of innovation. As our stories became increasingly elaborate, we learned important language arts skills, in persuading teammates why having this boulevard here, not somewhere else, served the city.

Sometimes I wonder what became of my fellow builders. The military reassigned my father every two years, so most of my childhood friends retreated to the anonymity from which they arose. How many of them are architects, storytellers, schoolteachers now?

And how many of them daily apply the skills we learned at the farthest verge, building cities out of sand?

One Afternoon in Stull Cemetary, Kansas

Stull Cemetery

I’m unsure exactly when Stull Cemetery entered national consciousness. Before or after it appeared on TV’s Supernatural? Series creator Eric Kripke wrote the show’s protagonists, Sam and Dean Winchester, as originally being from Lawrence, Kansas, to incorporate the urban legends surrounding Stull into the series. Kripke originally wrote a five-season story arc, culminating in an apocalyptic confrontation between Satan and the Archangel Michael in Stull.

What I found in Stull Cemetery was far from horrific. Stull itself, never a particularly large town, has been reduced to a wide spot in the Kansas 1600 Road, very little remaining besides the cemetery and a United Methodist Church. The cemetery is surrounded by a chain-link fence, and is open only during limited hours. Sheriff’s patrols visit intermittently throughout the day, to discourage vandals and souvenir hunters.

For a reputed ghost town, though, Stull’s cemetery continues attracting numerous new graves. Though I didn’t perform a thorough survey, I saw over ten gravestones with dates in the last decade; one was dated January 2021. Stull, a community founded by Pennsylvania Dutch, continues to inter its honored dead in the same earth where their ancestors have buried their friends and neighbors since White settlers seized this land in the 1870s.

Urban legend holds that Stull Cemetery is one of the eight Gates of Hell, places where the living world and the afterlife of perdition sit perilously close together. This legend has made the cemetery a destination of Goth-culture pilgrimages, especially around Halloween. Gawkers come hoping to witness supposed in-person visitations of Satan’s minions, who supposedly manifest among the remains of the old, stone-walled Evangelical United Brethren church.

The grave of Essie P. Buck; note the broken
stone, patched with concrete

This legend, however, only dates to 1974, when it ran in the University Daily Kansan, the student newspaper at the University of Kansas, in nearby Lawrence. In 1974, fewer students had cars, so Stull, sixteen miles from Lawrence around Carter Lake, could’ve been on the far side of the moon. Maybe students got a frisson of transgression by thinking a manifestation of Hell existed so close, yet so far. They probably never dreamed the story would grow legs.

Stripped of paranormal woo-woo, Sarah and I found a place characterized not by terror, but by celestial calm. Many stones are freshly decorated with silk flowers. In late spring, fading daffodils and hyacinths surround several graves. Stones dated from the late 19th Century lie adjacent to stones from the last five years. Family graves, children’s graves from the Spanish Influenza, and veterans’ headstones from two world wars, Korea, and Vietnam mingle freely.

Kansas 1600 Road runs alongside the cemetery, and up a slope, one course of large, rough-hewn bricks marks the former EUB church building. Though it sits beside a heavily trafficked road, Stull Cemetery feels like a place removed, a bastion of peace. A gentle breeze, scented by the trees surrounding Carter Lake, urged Sarah and I to sit in front of a grave marked as Essie P. Buck, who died in 1878.

We wanted to simply be present.

Yet around us, evidence testified that others didn’t enter these grounds with open hearts. Several 19th-Century monuments had much newer pediments under them, several with visible smears of patching plaster. Sure signs that these stones had once been overturned, and been reset, probably with anchor bolts to prevent them being moved again. Some might’ve been overturned by subsidence and erosion. But the likelier culprit was vandalism.

Essie P. Buck’s five-foot obelisk has a large diagonal crack, filled with cement. The stone probably broke when somebody, presumably a student, pushed it over. These physical markers of bad-faith presence remind us of the conflicting forces driving places like this. Loved ones chose this place, its peaceful air and soothing nature, to memorialize their lives forever. And paranoid children, fearful of eternity, defaced that memorial.

The Houk family monument, victim
of subsidence and possible vandalism

“Look at the bird,” Sarah said, pointing. “What is it?”

Above us, a broad-winged hawk with a fringe of dark feathers around its cream-tinted wings, glided in a sweeping arc. Another matching hawk followed shortly after. Watching their massive wings and graceful spiral, I couldn’t help remembering the large wings that Renaissance artists painted on angels. Spirits that, unlike us mere mortals, weren’t confined to earth.

The salacious legends had attracted us to visit. Eric Kripke painted Stull as a frightening, apocalyptic necropolis. But we found a refuge, a place unsullied by our world’s violence and poverty. Media hucksters tell us our world is teeming with terrors and mortality. But this place reminds me that peace and beauty exist.

And the Truth Shall Set You

Austin Channing Brown, I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness

Austin Channing Brown wants White people to understand what it takes to survive a day in her skin. She wants us to think about how our unspoken assumptions narrow her choices, how our demands for understanding impinge upon her freedom. For her, this isn’t an academic exercise in statistics and probabilities. As a Black woman working in White spaces, the implications of Whiteness are a challenge she faces daily.

Brown uses her own autobiography, as a career activist in a Christian outreach ministry, to commence her story. In this, Brown’s story overlaps thematically with other activists I’ve read recently, including Danté Stewart and Ibram Kendi. However, Brown places the autobiographical content front and center: her writing is deeply positional. By that I mean this isn’t everyone’s story, it’s Brown’s, coming from her position as both Black and a woman.

From this position, she identifies patterns in her life starting with individual incidents. Her childhood, in a primarily White Christian school, where her teachers’ “colorblind” optimism clashes with students who harbor, and speak, profound hatred. Her multifaceted religious upbringing, and the collision between White and Black expressions of Christianity. Her professional activism career, as frequently the only Black person in overwhelmingly White spaces.

As Brown’s story unfolds, patterns become clear: White people make her responsible for their feelings. When confronted with the atrocities which racism has wrought, White people come blubbering to her, begging for absolution. When racism’s lingering presence threatens White people’s sense of self, White people lash out, expecting her to absorb their anger. Whatever happens, Brown finds herself constantly managing White people’s feelings.

Brown’s memoir of interactions with White people and Whiteness includes events that are sometimes frightening, but most often heart-wrenching. From well-meaning people coming to grips with their own inherited privilege and unexamined prejudices, to others refusing to come to grips and instead displacing their feelings into rage, Brown conveys the feelings which others bring to her. The problem is, managing others’ feelings shouldn’t be her responsibility.

Austin Channing Brown

Throughout her narrative, Brown’s Christianity informs her story. She describes how, in attending her first minority-Black church, she discovered an ethic of service and celebration that motivated her subsequent life— an ethic sadly missing in many majority-White congregations. (I can relate.) Her willingness to serve, and to reach across racial lines to build consensus in workplaces, schools, and other public places, comes explicitly from her Christianity.

This Christian ethic has limits, however. At what point does Brown get to stop maintaining others’ feelings? When White people react adversely to being challenged on America’s existing system, when is she allowed to refuse the battle? She recounts her story with a mix of emotions: great love for those who need her guidance, but also great fatigue at having to repeat the same battles ceaselessly. Surely God respects her weariness.

It’s difficult to synopsize this book without short-changing Brown’s story. Though the book is itself short for its genre, under 200 pages, she leads her readers through enough changes that the book feels epic, without feeling long. She moves from intimate recounting of her own story, to broader themes, and back again with ease. This is Brown’s personal story, but she emphasizes, it’s also the story of millions of Black Americans daily.

I read widely about race in America today. Stories like Brown’s aren’t new to me. Yet she makes clear something that’s percolated silently in my brain, without previously finding expression: that despite whatever progress we’ve made, our system still sees Whiteness (and, less explicitly, maleness) as America’s default position. People like me might sympathize mightily with Brown’s story, but the system allows us to forget. Brown doesn’t have that freedom.

Like Stewart or Kendi, Brown writes not only to convey her life lessons, but to present those lessons in one place, permanently. Instead of having to teach the same lessons time after time, she can present her book. And it’s important for us readers, too: though Brown says little I haven’t read in other writers, it’s good to hear it again. Because though I already believe her, I also have the privilege of occasionally forgetting.

Brown’s story is brief without being scanty, and personal but not sentimental. We can read her memoir with an open heart, or give copies to our loved ones who need to understand what “the system” means. Her Christian thread also makes her book valuable in churches, a space nominally dedicated to liberation, though we often lose sight. She takes us on an important, necessary journey.

How I Learned That I Haven’t Learned Much

Before I even finished reading Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus, about the modern plague of short attention spans, I began plotting how to apply Hari’s insights. There wasn’t one single answer to this question. Hari rejects the individualistic attitude, that dwindling focus is each person’s moral failing, believing instead that evidence shows this is a product of policy choices and commercial greed. We’ll only address this problem, Hari insists, by banding together to confront the source.

Nevertheless, Hari agrees individuals can take certain steps to begin the process of evicting the corporate squatters from our brains. One such step he calls “precommitment,” deliberately deciding on a specific step and applying it consciously. Precommitment isn’t something vague; it doesn’t mean declaring “I won’t spend four hours noodling on my phone after work.” After all, though that’s a fine-sounding sentiment, it lacks concrete steps: how will I avoid getting sucked into that routine?

For me, it involved a simple vow: I wouldn’t let my phone into my bedroom anymore. My reasoning was simple. On getting home from work, tired and incoherent from a day’s exertions, and changing out of my work clothes, I’ve developed a habit of flopping onto my bed and browsing my phone to decompress. This inevitably descends into a doom-spiral of FaceTube and InstaTwit, and though I always promise myself otherwise, it lasts for hours.

Hari singles out bedtime phone-scrolling as a major contributor to insomnia and mental health struggles. The light levels on phone screens, especially in darkened rooms, disrupts our circadian rhythms. He doesn’t acknowledge that phone manufacturers know this; most smartphones anymore come with night mode, a setting that filters light, particularly the most disruptive blue-wave light. If the physiological complaints were the only problem with in-bed phone browsing, well, the technology mavens already fixed that problem.

For me, though, the problem ran deeper. My body, my eyes, don’t respond to the phone; it's my sense of time. The suffusion of social media into my private time creates the expectation that something will happen imminently. As a sprout, I hated being ordered to bed, because I thought something exciting would happen after I fell asleep: something fun on TV, or guests stopping by, or whatever. My phone fills that role in adulthood.

Johann Hari

Here’s the thing: it worked! It didn’t solve the problem of coming home fatigued and incoherent, certainly. But when I did, and flopped on my bed in t-shirt and jeans, I was confronted with the present. Instead of the expectant promise that something fun would happen soon, I existed right now. As I wondered what to do with that present, my eyes landed on the pile of books I’ve bought and hoarded without reading them.

I read Sequoia Nagamatsu’s debut novel, How High We Go In the Dark, in under 48 hours. I don’t believe I’ve read anything that fast since the pandemic began. Without my phone to create distractions that somebody might say something funny, uplifting, or personally meaningful on social media, I was present enough to read an entire book. I felt refreshed. My mind felt cleansed of the detritus from ten years of instantly available brain candy.

Then I did whatever anybody, flush with the heady excitement of secular enlightenment, does: I got smug about myself. I began preparing my presentation about my life-changing insight. In my head, I was already writing my self-righteous TED Talk about making small changes and achieving great outcomes. I patted myself on my back, told myself I’d done it, and began planning my new sideline career evangelizing the power of small lifestyle changes for big results.

So smug was I, that I stopped enforcing my precommitment. Having banned my phone from my bedroom, I started doom-scrolling in the living room. Then, because I was listening to an audiobook on my phone, I decided that this time doesn’t count, and carried it into the bedroom. While listening, I opened a game, to occupy my eyes while my ears listened. Next thing I knew, three hours passed, and I remembered nothing I’d heard.

My problem, I’m realizing, isn’t my phone. Though my phone channels my human tendency toward passivity, it’s secondary. My problem begins because, like most humans, I desire to minimize resistance in life, to coast on momentum. When jobs, social connections, and hobbies provide momentum, our passive time is, in some way, creative. But when technology substitutes present reward for an undefined future, I passively miss the present. Clearly, I still have so much to learn.

Modern Violence and Modern Repentance

My mother and me. We're not great at taking photos, so awkward selfies are what we have.

My mother said something this holiday weekend that hasn’t always come completely easily to her lips: “I’m sorry.” But that could sound wrong. She’s never had difficulty apologizing if she did something wrong in the moment, like stepping on someone’s toes. In those situations, she could easily acknowledge the mistake, and try to make amends. That part has never been in question.

This time, she apologized not for something she did momentarily, but for something she believed over the long haul. It occurred in the context of describing an adventure I had when, a week before Christmas, I drove into Kansas City to attend a concert. She expressed admiration for my ability to remain calm and even-headed driving on some of America’s worst urban highways, something that’s always terrified her.

“I’m sorry for holding you back,” she said. “I’m sorry for projecting my fears onto you. The conflicts of big-city living were always so intimidating for me, I know that when you were younger, you wanted the kinds of experiences that only happen in big cities. That scared me so badly, and I projected that onto you, and I know that sometimes held you back. And for that, I’m sorry.”

My parents grew up in small, close-knit Nebraska towns like Ogallala and Hay Springs, amiable communities where people knew and trusted one another. Mostly. For those willing to conform themselves to community standards, Nebraska can be an inviting, friendly place. But Nebraska has also sometimes been intensely violent. When we returned here in 1992, Nebraska was also an overwhelmingly White state. And that, my friends, has never been a coincidence.

For all her willingness to embrace new experiences, my mother never particularly needed to interact with diverse communities until well into adulthood. Until my father commenced his Coast Guard career when they were approaching thirty, they’d lived in a succession of small- to medium-sized towns with White Protestant heteronormative populations. That limited experience with diversity continues to influence her thinking to this day.

Though registered Republicans, my parents hold distinct egalitarian views, at least on a person-to-person level. They believe racism, sexism, and economic injustice are wrong, and need redressed. But until recently, they saw these problems as essentially individual. They saw racism, for instance, as an individual White person dropping an N-bomb in public; when it comes to populations, they rationalized away practices like redlining and racialized mass incarceration.

Riot police in Baltimore, Maryland, April 27th, 2015

When confronted with entire neighborhoods, many more populous than the towns they grew up in, that were functionally segregated along racial, social, or economic lines, my parents faced a society that remained deeply unjust. And, like most White people, this injustice reflected on them. This created a deep moral disquiet within their souls, as you can imagine. But unlike today, they lacked a framework to understand this disquiet.

Today, we often describe practices like redlining, unequal educational access, and other forms of half-legal racism as “violence.” Same for sexism, genderism, and other forms of exclusion. I think my mother unconsciously recognized this violence, but lacked the terminology to understand it. Therefore, faced with the perception of violence, but no clear bloody noses, she perceived the violence as directed against her.

It’s easy to pooh-pooh the defense of “it was a different time.” Some White Protestant heteronormative people in past eras understood injustice on the ground, so anybody, the reasoning goes, could. But that’s like saying all Black people could overcome racism because Oprah did. Not everyone has the intellectual framework, moral backbone, or community support to escape their social context. My mother deplored unfairness; she just couldn’t always see it.

Therefore, to restate: my mother saw and understood that living in diverse American cities, driving the crowded city highways, and taking the economic risks to pursue an art career, as violent. Because, at least on a psychological level, it was. But because she couldn’t clearly understand who caused the violence, and who was on the receiving end, she internalized the violence around her.

A lot of White people probably did this, and believed, not unreasonably (in that context), that the violence was directed at them. As parents do, they wanted their children to avoid the crushing psychological pain of violence. Therefore they defend what limited privilege comes from a society that defines Whiteness, Christianity, and heterosexuality as “normal.” They arguably aren’t malicious; they just don’t see their part in the violence.

My mother only wanted to keep me safe. Unfortunately we can only remedy this violence by acknowledging it, walking into its source, and challenging it where it lives. At her age, my mother can only repent her part in perpetuating this violence. I’m still young enough to take responsibility and walk into the fire. In a very real way, her apology gives me the freedom to do so.