You Are (serving) Enough

Installment 2 - The Failing Fountains

The wells are dry now.

The taps rattle with air, the pipes groan with nothing. The blades stand frozen, gears welded with rust. At night the cities are black — no hum of current, no lamps in the windows. Only silence.

We were told it would never come to this. The profs said: “You are enough as you are. Our Market System will incentivize someone else to do it.” And we believed.

Sure, there had been those — engineers, mechanics, techies — who warned us.

I once read in Earth Abides how the pipes, after the sickness, dried due to inattention. But that inattention was due to pandemic. Rather, our systems failed while we looked away. The pipes dried not by malice or by mortality. Instead, they died from a lacking work ethic, a lack of civic responsibility…from a validating and entitling theology.

We thought the spiritual and natural worlds were set up to keep us endlessly pumped with good things.

And so we “reasoned” that to trust logic — ours or others’ — was to lack faith and reject followship. Any expression that we were not “the elect” revealed we weren’t.

But we avoided Logic and Science because their results might render us culpable: Dumping our waste would foul the ocean and sicken the fish. The CO₂ of seventy million car trips each day could, over time, collect in the atmosphere and heat up the planet. The consumption of eight billion souls was already exceeding the earth’s carrying capacity? Such reasoning was troubling, disturbing, and humbling.

So we need not do math. Or science.

And for heaven’s sake, we should never open ourselves deeply to history — to performing arts like the Hamilton play, where we might see our very-human founders transcending their own very-human foibles with cooperation, humility and, gasp, submission to logic. (So we’ll dismiss it as Woke) And we should never entertain the idea of parallels between Axis countries in the 30’s and us.

There was nothing validating in that.

For some, the spores freed us from inhibitions against grift — let us ignore the fact that our “work” of marketing our image, power, and charm —“influencing”— was adding no value! For others who lived in the ivy walls, diversity “dialog” heightened the intensity of the spores, blinding sniffers to the contradictions that left them cruel… and left them so uncaring they didn’t question what good they were actually doing. For many, the spores whispered through the halls of humanities: no shame in leaving behind the hard disciplines, the rigors of calculus, language, or integrity, of dissatisfaction with sloppy scholarship and shallow understanding.

And their graduates felt validated. “I studied in the Academy.”

Of course, the trade schools and professional schools cultured their own yeast: Wow, said the Regents of Retention: you’ve worked hard and mastered difficult skills: You know enough — you certainly don’t need to associate yourselves with “liberal” artsies. And you need not concern yourself with what society needs. That’s for the elites.

Of course, all our schools claimed to teach “logic”. But it was spurious logic like, Both things can’t be true. It’s only “either-or”. Never “both-and”.

Meanwhile, the engineers, mechanics, and electricians — the fruitful — were not elevated to respect.

Those who worked on public utilities were dismissed as mere public servants, to be discredited rather than honored.