Things in the air. Some observations with varying degrees of introspection.
Cheerfulness strengthens the heart and makes us persevere in a good life. Therefore the servant of God ought always to be in good spirits.
St. Philip Neri.
I've recently had the opportunity, or rather no choice, but to observe some interesting personalities at work.
The first one I'll note I've known for a very long time, and over time I've watched this person sort of crawl into themselves.
They're mad.
I'm not really sure at what. But I'll make an observation below that may explain it.
This person had a really rough early life, but it picked up considerable in the person's teens. Still, coming from a "blended" family, this person sort of got the short end of the stick on a major family deal, and was quietly resentful about it.
Now the non blood "step" is seeking to address it. The person is middle aged, and the other person is in early old age, as am I. The middle aged person is now outright refusing to accept the fix.
What the crap?
"They could have done that years ago. . .".
Dumbest excuse for being a difficult pain in the ass ever.
Same person has something much like this shorter term.
I've also had the occasion to observe a really angry person. The really angry person is obviously pretty intelligent, but also obviously very uneducated. It's a bad combination.
A lot of fairly intelligent, but uneducated, people like to use words that they don't know the meaning of, so they use them incorrectly. This person does that repeatedly. If you know what the words actually mean, it's really very sad.
It's also a bit sad to see how this works when the bloom is off the rose of righteous, if misguided, indignation. When lots of people have their pitchforks out, a person in this situation is sort of a leader. But real people, with family, jobs, children, move on. They have to. New things develop, olds things go by the wayside.
Watching somebody getting into a one sided yelling match while everyone else is just bored is sad, in an odd sort of way. You can tell they know that themselves. The spotlight moved on.
There's a lot of Twitter Twits raging about how pastors didn't preach on Charlie Kirk last week. As I've said before, why would they? And if they did, in a truly Christian fashion, what would they have said.
Mind you, I'm a Catholic, not a member of a do it yourself protestant church that is heavily invested in the American Civil Religion.
Truth be known, Americans always have been.
If you did preach on Kirk, the preaching probably would be awkward for all. You could simply make it:
We see today the horror of the Western world's perversion of our God given natures, and how that warps the mind and leaves it prey to evils of all kind. Let us keep that in mind in our society, as we address such lies as transgenderism.
But that's only one such ill that warps our nature. How did we get there? Allowing for mass societal infanticide, which Kirk complained about? Yes. But also making our reproductive organs chemical cesspools designed to destroy nature from the onset, and ignoring the injunction against divorce, warping marriage into a big party for "fulfillment" Those of you in the pews contracepting, or living with third or fourth "spouses", you are as much to blame for the death as transgenderism is.
So too those who now identify their religion with any political party. Our home is in the next world, not this one, and the Republican Party or Democratic Party are not an apostolic synod. If you are finding your politicians to be saints, you need to sit alone and pray for yourself.
Bear in mind also that our time will come like a thief in the night. We cannot rely on a future to repent, as we may not have that future. The sins we commit for any reason, including with our words, may find themselves still on our souls. Let us resolve to be right with God today.
Probably everyone would be mad
Which gets me to this.
Charlie Kirk, I'll fully accept, was Christian. He said some very Christian things, and some very non Christian things. He was a provocateur, and that's a dangerous thing for a person's soul.
As for the other two people mentioned here, I don't know about one, but I do know about the other, that being the first one. That person is a Christian but more or less a lazy American sort of Christian. They believe in God, have a grasp of Christ, and figure if you don't steal or shoot people, you are probably good with God and they don't want to know much more than that.
That describes most Americans, quite frankly.
That hasn't always been the case, however.
Those Christians who are all upset about Kirk not being mentioned from the pulpit are too heavily invested in the American Civil Religion. When the next world arrives for them, and it will soon, and they're not recognized, saying "I left my church as there was no preaching about Kirk" won't make up for not feeding the poor, letting people die in droves in Gaza, and the like. Presenting your "I'm a real read blooded (white) American card" isn't going to get you a free pass.
And, additionally, the pastors whom they want to preach on Kirk probably ought to instead preach instead on greed, divorce, shacking up, and other stuff that the American Civil Religion is pretty okay with.
And, also, here's something else.
I saw a Twitter Twit who was outraged as a transgendered person murdered his parents in Utah awhile back, and the news, he thought, had not paid any attention to it.
Well, I'm sure they did in Utah, but that's not a national news story. Part of our contemporary problems in this country are that we treat local stories as if they're of global importance, while ignoring global stories because they don't pertain to us.
Christians, mostly Catholics, are being murdered in droves in Africa. That is important. Why don't we hear about that?
Well, they're black, African, and Catholic. Ho hum. . .
But there's more to this, Outraged Twitter Twits. Charlie Kirk was murdered last week. Most Americans no longer care one bit.
That may be uncomfortable for those who are a member of the populist Sturmabteilung, but it's the truth. Charlie Kirk isn't going to become their Horst Wessel as most Americans just don't care. They're desensitized to killing, which is actually at a record low in any event, and by now most average Americans are sick of the right and the left and worried about groceries, while starting to watch the national opiate, football. Sydney Sweeney's cleavage falling out of her jeans jacket will have longer legs than this.
We aren't going to have a civil war. There's not going to be a lot more violence. And they'll be disappointed.
Speaking of crawling into one's self (you'll have to go back up to the top for the reference), I've seen that happening to somebody I know, whose husband I know better.
And frankly I sort of see this in a fair amount with younger Boomer and older Gen X women . . . women who bought the lie that careers will make them happy.
Frequently it plays out with the same script. Well educated middle class women of this vintage married well educated men. The men of the same generation were still part of the "you need to get a good job to support your family" culture, as we've seen before, but the women were part of the "a career will make you happy". What seems to have happened to a lot of them is that work didn't make them happy, no surprise, and at some point many, but not all, dropped out of it.
Kids grew up and moved on, if they had kids at all. Now they're getting to what would normally be retirement years and they feel cheated and lost.
The story for a lot of men isn't much different. I see it with professional men all the time. Earlier this week a lawyer in his 70s told me gleefully how he loves his job. Oh horseshit. There's just nothing left. The thing is, however, for women who bought off on this, there's really nothing left. Quite a few of them, however, are in pretty good economic situations due to a husband that worked for decades to support everyone, and who has kept on.
Anyhow, in this case, the spouse, probably of over 30 years, packed up and left basically with no warning.
She'd been seeing a counsellor, a profession that does so much damage to people it isn't funny. The counsellor had told her to work on herself, which is pretty close to instructing somebody to be a narcissist. She moved out, moved away, and is camping with her adult daughters. They're getting a "grey divorce".
The husband, whom in my view should have retired some years ago. There's some fault there. A lot of times when I see some old male lawyer keeping on keeping on, I really wonder what his relationship is at home.
All in all, I suspect, he worked too much, she got lonely, and wondered why life hadn't turned out like Cosmopolitan promised it was supposed to.
Well, it was never going to.
I'd also note that he was raised Catholic, while she was not, but he fits into the Catholic satellite category. That is, the lessons of the faith were just too inconvenient for him to apply. He, and his siblings, remain cultural Catholics, basically, but not practicing ones. It clearly tortures him as he knows better. Probably not that much should have been expected out of her, however, as she was never Catholic.
And so you have a couple living the 1970s version of the American Dream, which turns out to be a pretty shallow dream at that. Same with the folks mentioned above.
And the shallowness of that dream explains a lot about post Boomer generations abandoning it and returning to more foundational existential beliefs.
The State bar convention is going on. I never go it in person. I don't have the time, and I'm such an introvert that I don't want to go to the dinners and the like just on the random chance one of my lawyer friends might be there, but now you can attend some of it electronically. I did that yesterday as I needed the CLE credits.
I wish I hadn't.
The first CLE I attended I picked up as I needed the ethics credit. It was an hour of "mindfulness" which is usually a bunch of bullshit suggestions on how to deal with stress that you really can't implement in the real world. That's what it turned out to be, in part, but it descended into "this job really sucks" for an hour. All of the panelists, including a judge and a justice, had to have counselling at some point in their careers for work stress.
I hope some students were in the audience to see that. If even Wyoming Supreme Court justices say the practice is so bad they need psychological help to endure it, well that's pretty bad.
The last CLE of the day was the legislative panel. Usually I think of that as being new laws that are coming down the pipeline, which it partially was, but the first part started off as a plea from a lawyer/legislator for lawyers to run for office, noting how in Wyoming that's declined enormously. That turned into an outright dumping on the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, which needs to be dumped on. The last part of that session, however, dealt with the ongoing massive decline in civil practitioners putting in for judgeships. They just aren't doing it. They were urged to do it.
As noted, I wasn't there to ask a question, but if I had been, I'd have asked why should they, when Governor's have agendas and the current Governor is only really interested in appointing prosecutors. It's extremely obvious. The one before that would almost always pick a woman, if possible, and was very open about that. If you are a male civil practitioner, just forget it.
Justice Kautz, who is now the current AG, noted how being a judge, and particularly a justice, was a great job for a law nerd. The last panelist, a current Fed defender who was a private lawyer with a very wide practice, noted how he had put in many times and urged people to do so, even though it was disappointing if you did not make it.
It's disappointing for sure.
For me, hearing Justice Kautz talk was outright heartbreaking, as what he expressed made up the very reasons I wanted to be a judge and replied repeatedly, with no success. I never even got an interview, even though at one point I was being urged by judges and members of the judicial nominating committee to apply. I'm frankly bitter about it even while knowing that I should not be. It's hard not to come to the conclusion that the system has become a bit of a fraud, frankly, particularly now that the committee has been rounded out to include non lawyers in it. I've felt for some time that the Governor's office had an influence on who was picked, even though I have no inside knowledge on that sort of thing. It's just a feeling, and not a good one. When judges are picked which leave almost all the practitioners wondering what happened, it's not a good thing.
It leads to me listening to everything Justice Kautz said about the reasons he wanted to be a judge, and myself realizing I once felt those things, but I no longer do.
Back on the stress part of this, a lawyer I've known for a long time, but who is quite a bit younger than me, recently took a really neat vacation. He came back to the office and announced he's leaving the law. I was so surprised I called him. He revealed that being on vacation had taught him he didn't have to live a miserable life.
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