jumping ship

breaking free of the current

Red Star Lines Cruise Ship Travel Poster, 1900s, Henri Cassiers

The more the ideologies of our world purport to expand us into all things inclusive and equal, the more narrow our expectations of being. Gifts of judgment and discernment must be hobbled by some for the free reign of others. A disdain of what is wholesome and innocent pervades. From books to movies to every news report and social commentary, we are being inundated with the erasure of fundamental truths in the name of the expression of one’s “own truth”. Not one’s own opinions or hopes or beliefs. No, that’s not good enough. It’s one’s own “truth” as if truth is as subjective as your favourite ice cream flavour.

As more and more people come to reject the madness, the louder the machine roars. Talk of censoring freedoms and imposing right-think is critical if all of this garbage is going to stick. One of our daughters was just telling me about her friend who recently got hired on with a company that works with at-risk youth. This friend was just informed that masks were a part of the job even though nobody else in the system she’s working with, including the children, will be wearing them. But she must. She, who is working face-to-face with young children must mask her beautiful face. Oh, and pronoun badges are mandatory. This friend of our daughter’s is struggling with the reality of needing a job and her heartfelt conviction that these job ‘requirements” are demands gone too far.

But she’s only one of many. We’ve seen the same in our household, with a position my husband took a few years ago demanding he partake in the charade. They wanted pronouns on badges. Some of you have seen my husband. He is 220 pounds of muscle. There are patients at the hospitals he works at that call him the “viking doctor”. No pronouns necessary. Need one? Sure, use Viking. In every instance, the aggressive, threatening demands to adopt group think for the ideology while the erasure of other’s values, beliefs, and heck even sex, is deemed acceptable.

The more they push, the more fed up the general populace has become. I hear it in every day conversations. I read it in heterodox forums and platforms. I listen to brilliant minds dissect, with surgical precision, the whole folly of these ideologies that undermine the very foundation of our society. We are sliding and people’s antennas are picking up the fall. The very pillars and structures that form the backbone of who we are as a people are crumbling. Now shock and awe replaces tradition and morality. Guiding principles and agreed upon values are antiquated in this brave new world. If you cannot accept that porn is woman empowerment and “rainbow dildo monkeys” make great teachers at story time for your kids, you’re a bigot and a monster. Off with your head!

All of these things can feel overwhelming. We’re on this great behemoth of a ship chugging along at sea. We have no control over the direction. The people that do, the ones sitting behind the controls are closed off in their fortified helm. We can’t even see what they’re up to. They pull the levers and turn the switches and we feel the sway and acceleration. Outside of their fortified headquarters, millions of bodies - the “useful idiots”. The loyal believers of the almighty ‘doctrine of distracted delusion’ stand en guard. The masses shovelling the coal into those hungry engines. Always at the ready to take any objectors out. Faithfully keeping the machine running.

What can we possibly do?

Well, we can start with realising that this ship isn’t going anywhere good. In fact, it’s not going anywhere at all. It’s on an endless loop. It goes as fast as possible in hopes that we don’t know that there are islands scattered everywhere. Our vertigo blurs our awareness of the possibilities. There’s the sense that there is something out there, but it’s tough to discern what it actually is. Maybe it’s something magnificent. Maybe it’s our absolute ruin.

That’s the design of it. When you really start to think about it, when you sit in your solitude and are still, you realise that the whole damn ride is meant to keep you hanging on for dear life. You are convinced that should you jump, it’s the end of you. Nobody else is jumping. In fact, most are figuring out ways to live as is. To accommodate the limitations of their dizzying ride, they just stop looking outward at all. They stay off the decks. They put their noses down, do what they’re told, and distract themselves when that lonely little chunk in their souls asks for more.

But some do jump. Some throttle themselves into the abyss with nothing more than faith that whatever it is that’s out there is better than what’s below their feet. They may not know the details or the design, but off they go. Others stand with their bodies pressed against the rails, tasting the wind, training their eyes to the colours as they pass. Trying to figure out the safest course of action for their exit. Maybe they won’t fling themselves off the side, maybe they’ll lower themselves down with a rope. They may not know what they want, but they most certainly know it’s not what’s on offer. They’ve watched as their destination gets closer and closer and they are ready for it… this time. Yes, this time. This go around, they will get off. Some actually will. Others will go back to their seats and talk about it to their friends. They all agree, next go around in the spiral, they will all head out. Until then, they might as well get comfortable. They haven’t figured out that the endless loop is actually a downward spiral. “And, say you, kind sir, what was the name of this ship again?”

This week in the Substack Chat, we had a wonderful discussion around the topic of the shaping of our lives outside of the system. That looks different for almost every person but in every case, regardless of where anyone falls on the continuum of sovereignty, the shared stories were fascinating and inspiring. Some included people who have worked out the rights to farm other people’s land for decades without having to actually purchase it. Others shared some of the details of living in housing and land cooperatives. Others spoke to the unique ways that they’ve been able to buy land. And many shared about their climb out of debt, or keeping themselves out of it while building lives of meaning as they see it. There were also a whole host of ways that people have gotten creative in generating income, living below their means, learning new skills, and building community.

Why do these things matter? Because they are the very things that allow us to move out of the machine that demands our ever-increasing loyalty to its tenets and ideologies. Religion has been replaced with this new rabid secularism. Our freedom of autonomous thought and belief must be sacrificed at the altar of these institutions if we are to participate. There is no choice in the land of inclusivity. There are no dissenting opinions permissible. The cost of the ease of going along to get along is that you are forever chained to the thoughts of others, the rules of others. No matter where they go, you too shall go. That’s the truth of it. And when you look around at the depravity and depression that abounds, it becomes clear that the toll is beyond what most of our human souls are cut out for.

I am not omnipotent. I cannot become a fence post and demand everyone around me disregard their eyes, their senses, their worldview, their experiences, and their intellect to now wholly and fully call me a fence post. To actually see me as one. To wrap me in barbed wire and not cross my path. I can do that for myself. Sure, why not. Who cares what I’m doing in my living room on a Saturday night. But that is not the point is it? The point is that you acquiesce all that makes you human so that my delusions of fence post grandeur can be fulfilled. It’s just another piece in the game that erodes one for another under the umbrella of “equality”.

In order for us all to be equal, one must be taken from to add to the other. The quality of what is taken and what is added is irrelevant. Inclusion and equality of outcome uses no such measure. We are only asked to sacrifice truth for the fantasies of another. Some religions are untouchable, others are open season in the most vile demonstrations of abject hatred. Some races are protected, others wickedly maligned. Some sexual preferences held up as brave and courageous and others get eye rolls. We are told that bugs will feature in our meals and cities that don’t let us move beyond our fifteen minute radius will save the day. Digital currencies will allow or disallow with nary a prison bar in sight. Everything, from our grocery stores to our movie theatres have been infiltrated with political and ideological bents. Even our bodies are up for grabs. You want freedom? That will be a pound of flesh, if you please.

It’s all so big and convoluted. It can feel impossible to untangle from, but untangle people do! And they do it in a myriad of ways. Is anything guaranteed? Will my path be yours? No and no. Of course not. That’s not life. Life is excavating your own with courage and steadfast determination. Steadfast, that’s our word - the word my husband and I determined was the central theme of our marriage, our family, and our lives. We decided that back when we first found each other. And steadfast has steadfastly remained. It’s been our guiding word when we needed guidance. It’s been our rally point when we needed to rally. What’s your word for your life? Maybe you have many? Maybe you haven’t given it much thought. We went on to write a mission statement for our lives. Do you have a mission statement? Maybe you oughta.

I suppose this downward slide into madness is why I’ve come to be so enamoured with old books in the last few years. I can barely sit through any form of modern “entertainment” anymore. In so much of what’s on offer today, this pervasive lecturing and demand of how to think about things. In every movie and book, “right think” clobbers me over the head. No, I don’t think so. Not for me. In these old books, especially the ones centred around the natural world, there is a smallness of the human that appeals to me. Yes, we’re important, but we are not so grandiose as to rewrite the rules of creation. We are limited by morals and virtues. We are contained within the laws of nature. We are powerless against universal truths. In each of those, touchstones of sanity in which to rest.

I recently read the delightful book, “Rascal”, by Sterling North. For anyone with smaller children, or anyone looking for a taste of nostalgia mixed with beautiful, clear and succinct writing from a time long gone, I highly recommend it. The book takes place in a small rural town during the early 1900s. It depicts the true tale of a young boy and his beloved pet raccoon. The simple honesty of a young man’s observations and his love of the natural world pervades. Lesson after lesson of expansion and constraint from the natural world in which he is so immersed. He sees tragedy and is brought to his knees by heartbreak, but there is nothing to do but surrender. He cannot change reality. He cannot demand the conformity of truths to his ideas. The only place that that can be done is in an illusory fiction. He does not live in fiction.

In the story, I was taken by the characterisation of the adults in the young boy’s life. The real life humans from a time long gone. Some of them salty, some with a sweetness and generosity, just like us. But imagine, a young boy today taking a canoe out into the wilderness and stumbling upon a recluse who starts up a conversation and before you know it, the old man in the woods has brought the young boy to his favourite fishing hole where the two of them share a day together. That story almost sounds ominous in our time and that’s part of the problem. That’s part of what we need to work to rectify.

Another element in the story, written over the period of World War I, is a sense of surrender of what cannot be controlled and the responsibility taken for what can. It seems that we’ve arrived in an upside down world where the things we can control - our perspective, our actions, how we interact in the world - are given away in an effort to avoid responsibility. It’s not my fault if I’m addicted to porn, or am obese, or miserable and cruel to others, or any other number of things. I am but a mere pawn in the hands of our unjust society. I cannot be held responsible because I never stood a chance. The Victimisation Olympics has many contestants.

But these old books I’m reading offer up the ghosts of a time past as wayfinders for our hungry spirits. They show that peace and security of place roll in on the wings of responsibility and discipline. Global calamities rage on but a neighbour’s wayward pet raccoon feasting in their gardens still warrants a community meeting to solve the issue. A sense of their need of each other is what is real in their lives and it’s what they are all working for and towards.

Peace comes from knowing what you can control in your life and surrendering what you can’t to the hands of brilliance and light. And when you do surrender, do it not with trepidation and fear, but with faith. There are things that must remain untouchable in you. They may be pulling the levers in their dark little cockpit, but take a look at your feet and arms would ya’? You are not chained to anything.

The power you have is in controlling what you can control in your life. And those things? They’re a lot. If you think otherwise, really dig into that perspective. Is it yours or is it one you’ve adopted somewhere along the line? Is it truth or is it serving you in some other way? Is “easy” getting the better of you? What you can control may seem, when held up against the illusion of the machine, trivial. But you, good human, are not redundant. God does not create for entertainment. Each of us, every single one, is here for a purpose.

To throw up our hands in exasperation is a failure to discern what is ours to put forth into this world. Let your energies be directed there. Being immobilised by the bigness of a thing is a misalignment of your focus. You are not asked to know every detail of the strategies before us. You’re not ever going to solve the riddle. Nobody has the map the weiners are using to drive us all to nutty-ville. It will always be one thing after another. It will always be distractions and erosion of what is good and sound. The message is that it’s all so big that there’s not a thing a peon like you could do - “you are too small to act.” And that’s the greatest con of all.

Stay true. Act true. Be aligned with the generous gifts you have been given and bring them to the rest of us. We need them. We need you. Your work is here and it’s not insignificant. Your payment for the life you have been given is in the spreading of your talents and your gifts. Beautify the world with your words, actions, love, creations, and your talents. Live in service to that beauty. Live in service to life. Speak up. Pull your weight. Pay your due. Make it matter.

p.s. Next week’s essay will be a Q&A. Paid subscribers can submit their questions here.

p.p.s. My apologies for the lack or a narrated version this week. I’m in the US, visiting my dear ittle granddaughter and my microphone sounds awful. Next week we’ll be back on track.