Disconfirming Information

For the past month, he'd been there, every morning, limping out to meet me with his cane in hand.

His house had been notable on my morning walk with the dog.  The semi-cluttered yard.  The primer-painted 1960s pickup truck.  The large no-trespassing sign, and the chain-locked back yard, and the overgrown gutters.

A month ago, he'd stopped me and asked for help as I'd walked by.   I said sure, let's talk.

Visiting his house, and listening to his story, he was a complex mess.  The house itself was a warren of debris, with a basement so packed with old electronics, car parts, and junk as to be functionally impassible.  His mind was equally cluttered, as he spun tales of thieves and constant burglaries, legal troubles and lawyers who were out to get him, and elderly neighbors embedding malware on his computer.   He needed legal help, and help selling the vast agglomeration of junk in his home, or so he said.   He was sick!  Everyone was stealing from him!   He was abused!

His anger seethed and snarled, a dog tearing at its tail, superheated by the Archimedean mirrors of his isolation.

And as that isolation was perhaps the dominant cause, I listened.   I stayed, and I came by day after day, and offered what help I could.  I offered to review legal documents with a former contract-officer's eye...but that need seemed to disappear the moment I mentioned it.  There were no documents.  I offered to follow up on a letter...but no, no, he didn't need that, not now.   I offered to clear out several vanloads of stuff, but no, no, he was going to sell it, it was worth something, he knew it.

What he did want was for me to go with him to the mass media and the French Embassy with evidence of the plots against him.  I politely demurred.

I did manage to get up on his roof and clean out his gutters, which was desperately needed, and read through one letter from the court for him.  He'd also asked me to contact a few local churches so that he could get free legal aid, while simultaneously telling me he'd been helped...by Mormons, and by some evangelicals...but that all of them had tried to steal his stuff.

About six days ago, as he told...again...the story of how he managed to escape the clutches of a local social service agency that contacted him to offer free mental health support, I demurred.  "Are you sure they were trying to entrap you," I asked.  There was confusion.  "What do you mean?"  "Is it possible they were just trying to help you," I suggested, as gently as possible.

"NO," he said, taken aback.   "It is the way I say it is.  You have to believe it is the way I say it is."  I had stepped on the mine.  A long rant followed.

And now the house is silent as I pass.   On the outside, at least.

Nothing, but nothing, drives us so quickly to madness as the unwillingness to engage with disconfirming information about ourselves.

Suburban Paranoia

My life is, for better or for worse, pretty stock standard suburban.  I live in a modest rambler.  I have two kids and a dog and a minivan.  My weekday life involves a daily pattern of activities that tend to include errands and laundry...and the requisite "activities."  Monday is School of Rock.  Tuesday is Swimming.  Wednesday is Hebrew School.  Thursday is Swimming Again.  Friday we catch our breath on Shabbas. 

Though I'm a suburban denizen, there's one aspect of suburbia I try not to internalize.  It's the...well...paranoia.  Suburbia is an easily frightened place.

When I'm doing the activity-shuttle thing, I sit and listen to the parents around me, who've been thrown together at semi-random based on the schedules they've inflicted on their children and themselves.  As I listen, I hear that there are schedules out there that make mine look like a cakewalk.  Families have color coded charts that lay out the variety of different activities.  Kids leave school, and cram in their homework on the way to karate, which is followed by guitar lessons, after which they snarf down fast food on the way to tutoring.

That endless churning takes a toll on our ability to develop connections where we live...because even though we have a home, we don't really live there.  We live scurrying around in our crossovers.  For some reason, that reminds me of a scripture.  Then again, most things do. 

Earlier this week, I listened to a Mom and a Dad talking about Halloween.  They were lamenting how sad and necessary it was that their kids needed to be driven to go trick or treating at the mall this year.  "It's just so dangerous out there now," said the Mom.  "So many crazy people."  The Dad nodded.  "It's just not safe out there any more.  Not like when we were kids." So more and more kids don't go door to door with their parents.  You don't get to know your neighbors. Communities don't bond and connect, because the world is scaaaary.

This is, of course, materially false.  Statistically, crime rates are lower than they were when I was a kid back in the 1980s and 1970s.  But stressed out, over-scheduled, struggling American parents don't have the focus to realize this.  As they fret about every little minute detail of their kid's lives, they hear from their attitude of fear.  They don't know their neighbors, because they are too busy working and juggling schedules and shimmering with stress.  What little information filters in from our profit-driven media is "Fear! Terror all around! More after these messages!" 

The Big-Parking-Lot churches they attend affirm this fear, filling the world outside of their sprawling campuses with a motley cast of unbelievers and the dangerously unsaved.  Get out into the community?  Work with others?  No chance.  "Keep your kids safe in the hermetically sealed programming of our sprawling Jesus Campus!  Fear!  Terror all around!  Make sure to tithe!"

It's a strange, dark, and fearful place we find ourselves.