America's Always Done It That Way

America is, or so we are often told by people who should know better, a Christian nation. It's a fairly common refrain among those on the far right, those who would self-describe as ultra-conservative. They see resisting change as a battle against the forces that are gradually, insidiously turning this country into some unrecognizable socialist horror. You know, like the People's Republic of Canada. Change is to be resisted.

I found myself yesterday musing at the irony in this.

Conservatives in America tend to be church folks. And church leaders know that the kiss of death for any church comes when it is governed by one particular and pernicious phrase: "We've Always Done It That Way." As a theory for the primary cause of church demise and decay, it's well tested. If a congregation is not open to change, not open to responding creatively to the new challenges in its community and the world, then it will die. It might take a while. But that church will eventually calcify and crumble and fail, because it has ceased to be a living entity.

Here I'm not talking about changing the central governing values of the church. I'm talking about changing the structural and procedural mechanics of church. You know, the crap that doesn't matter. Big, vibrant churches...which, paradoxically, are often the conservative ones...know this. You modify the form, while maintaining the essential content.

Observing the intensity of the resistance to some seemingly obvious and necessary structural changes in our country, I marvel that a nation filled with successful churches should be so ferociously resistant to change. Take, for instance, our approach to transporting our selves and our stuff. A car-based system of mass transportation is obscenely inefficient, abusively wasteful of both our time and our natural resources. But we LIIIIKE it. It's the way we've always done it. It feels comfortable. So even though it can't be sustained, we resist any efforts to change it. Just drill more! Just make more roads...so long as you don't make us pay for them. And keep gas cheap, so we can drive our big lumbering Suburbans just the way the Founding Fathers intended.

We choose to ignore that things are changing. We refuse to realize that the easy and abundant energy that comes from carbon-based sources of energy was the only thing that makes the inefficiencies in our system possible. We close our eyes to the approaching end of the Oil Age. We are, as a culture, like that college-town church that clings to organs and stained glass and high pulpits and robes. It might, for a time, survive. But eventually, clinging to forms and structures that no longer reflect the reality around us will be the end of us. Assuming we're not dead already.

Any halfway competent pastor could tell you that.

Blessed Are The Poor in Transport

Yesterday, I took my ratbike motorcycle to a nearby shop for a new drivechain and a new set of sprockets. It's a funky little shop, a far cry from the shiny shiny megadealer nearby. The mechanics there are cheery, heavily tattooed, and can do the work on time and for about half the price.

The challenge is getting back home after I've left them the bike, and then getting there again. It's about four miles from my house. I can't have my sons pick me up or drop me off. The 12 year old couldn't care less about driving, and while the nine year old would salivate at the opportunity to get the keys, I'm not sure that little jaunt would end well.

So when I go there, I take the Metrobus.

And We Hate Buses. Americans are carefully programmed to hate taking the bus, a process that begins in high school. It's cemented when that senior with their jacked up fire-engine red '71 Chevelle reminds sad little sophomores that they aren't ever, not never, going to get a girlfriend if they don't get themselves a sweet ride first. We don't like the bus. The popular, successful kids don't ride the bus. And we have to sit there, waiting, waiting, waiting, never sure when it will arrive. It's frustrating, particularly for thems of us who want it right now. It's the American way, baby.

That waiting impatiently part is no longer true. In DC, as I discovered yesterday, the buses are all outfitted with GPS transponders. Those transponders rely data about real-time location to a Metro computer, which then relays data to the Metro website. Information about when the bus will show up at any given stop can be accessed your mobile phone. It's accurate to within 30 seconds. Meaning, you don't have to wait around at the bus stop. It changes the whole equation.

But the popular kids part is still true. I rode the bus twice yesterday. Once the bus was half full. Once it was nearly completely full. Both times, I was the only Caucasian on the bus. Everyone else was Latino, or African American, or Asian, or of Middle Eastern descent. None had about them the trappings of affluence. There were no suits, or expensive shoes. I saw no-one else dickering about on their smartphone, whipping off e-mails to assistants. No-one was manically thumbtyping texts. These were folks who are not on the upper rungs of the economic ladder, or even on the middle rungs. They were working class.

The upper and middle classes were in their cars, zooming around us, talking on their cell phones. Many were driving SUVs. Others were driving hybrids. What struck me, sitting there on my honkey behind, was just how much better at caring for creation my fellow bus riders were.

Our bus was powered by natural gas, meaning essentially no emissions, and no reliance on oil from nations that hate us. With a third-full load of passengers, it gets the same mileage per passenger as my motorcycle. With a full load, that bus gets the equivalent of 165 miles per gallon, which even the best promises of plug-in hybrid technology can't offer.

As I looked around at America's working class, America's bus riders, I realized something. For all of the talk on the right about America' energy independence, and all the talk on the left about environmental stewardship and carbon neutrality, the people who are doing the most they can to make us more efficient are the folks who need to be efficient. As human beings, those who aren't growing temporarily rich on the fleeting abundance of our carbon economy are the ones who are doing the most to care for creation. The folks who cry Drill Baby Drill and the folks who buy thirty-five thousand dollar hybrids loaded with electronic gimcrackery aren't even coming close to the folks who ride the bus, day in, and day out.

Yeah, they may not be the cool kids. Or the "successful" ones. But those things don't really matter, now, do they?

Better a poor man whose walk is blameless than a rich man whose ways are perverse. (Proverbs 28:3)