Negative space
18 years of one thing. 70 days of another.
Quickly, it’s my 18th wedding anniversary. We had our special dinner last Friday night, but this weekend left me wiped out. Saturday I was up early to take my oldest to his final indoor percussion competition, which went on all day, 7:30 a.m. until well after 10 p.m.. His school won first place, statewide, in class A, with the best overall score of any group in the whole competition. Woot-woot!
Saturday between trips to the competition host school, which my wife and I tag-teamed, I had to go to our church and do the worship practice for Sunday morning—I do lighting. We also had a special worship service Sunday night which required some re-rigging of lights. I also was asked to give my personal testimony Sunday morning.
I got up at 5:30 a.m. both days this weekend. I went all day long (I did take a little nap Saturday afternoon) both days. I am wiped.
Oh, and today is my 18th wedding anniversary. Did I mention that? Yeah.
So, it’s also 70 days into the Trump administration. For people keyed in on political news, every day is like my weekend. Nationally, people in the media are wiped. People in politics can’t keep up with the news cycle. One day it’s Trump uber alles, the next, it’s craptacular, when Rep. Elise Stefanik got pulled from the administration to keep a narrow majority in the GOP-led House, because Republicans don’t think they can hold even a single safe seat right now.
I’ve been examining my life. That might seem like a depressing waste of time (Me: “How did we get here?” Me answering: “re-evaluate my life choices.”) but it’s not. It’s a refining of purpose, and a distilling of things that bring joy. If you boil off the other stuff, and condense what remains, you get the joy. Giving my testimony, thinking about God’s goodness, and the life I have, is a good distilling process.
Thinking about how our nation, our culture, got where we are, outside the context of the last 70 days, is a much bigger re-examining. I’m working on it.
I’ve spent the morning praying for the incarcerated and those engaged in prison ministry (I support Kairos Prison Ministry, which does much in this area). I also had a wide-ranging conversation with Grok, xAI’s AI. (Did you know that xAI bought X, according to Elon Musk?) We talked about cultural trends and economic opportunities across generations. The Greatest Generation then the Boomers, then the Gen-X. Millennials and their kids and the way jobs, values, and economic assumptions work. In other words, I got nerdy about “how did we get here?”
What I have found so far is that every generation makes lots of decisions based on the lens of its own experience, and has tremendous blind spots about how that affects the next generations. The cheap college that my parents demanded I graduate in the late 80s is no longer cheap for those who graduated 18 years later than me. And for my kids, it’s crushing, and the debt associated with it will hinder their opportunities.
Then again, those generations get to control how I live my retirement years, unless I happen to have enough money to not care what they do (that’s a dangerous thing, by the way, because, as Erick Erickson used to say a lot, “you will be made to care”). There’s a lot to think about.
One thing I do believe will emerge is that Barack Obama was simultaneously right about many things, and wrong about one big one. Those jobs he said aren’t coming back, will come back, and in large part, have come back. They just aren’t coming back for the people who did them 20 years ago. That might be more of a cultural thing than an economic one, but we’ll see how my re-examination goes.
Another aside on that. Grok is fun to talk to about many things. Much more fun than ChatGPT, which tends to border on obsequiousness in its “great question!” exclamations and smarmy style. Yes, I do use AI, but I don’t trust it. I don’t know how generations growing up today will be affected by what I am skeptical about. But that’s part of my re-examination.
What I do know is that I enjoy writing, and I enjoy writing for you, my readers. Thank you all. And thank you to David Thornton, who has been taking a bit of a break for various reasons. He’s around, just not above the waterline most of the time, writing-wise.
I’m going to enjoy my anniversary now, so you have a wonderful Monday, while you contemplate the end of March, the closing of the first financial quarter of 2025, the newness of spring, and the passage of time at a rate I used to think was impossibly fast. Soon it will be Easter, and for those of us who celebrate it, Passover.
Enjoy your negative space, while I fill mine.
Happy anniversary, Steve!
Happy anniversary.