Why Being a Parent Sucks

The real reason most people make lousy parents and why most people never grow up. 

Forty-some years ago, my two daughters were in their early teens and two of the people, a pair of brothers, who ran the company that employed me were about to become parents for the first time.  At the time, we were all middle management of a small manufacturing company, but they’d been there ten years longer than me and that made them “senior management.” But we were all the same age and we were peers and had a fairly close relationship.  During a meeting with the more adult of the two brothers, John, he asked me “What’s the secret to being a good father?”

From the outside, I suspect it appeared that Ms.  Day and I were actually competent parents.  Our daughters were smart, well-mannered, well-spoken, beautiful little people, but from my perspective we were making a mess of the job.  Our oldest was veering off into a bad crowd of Southern California punk rockers and skateboard punks and our youngest was trying to become a 1980’s Valley Girl with the associated shallow, fashion-oriented, pop culture values and neither were doing well in school and it was in no way the school’s fault.  In the 80’s—before Reagan’s anti-education, no social responsibility attitude, and “greed is good” damage to the California education system took root and started the social decay the whole country would soon follow—the California K-12 and college system was the model the rest of the civilized world would begin to follow as the US began its decent into the current brainless, uneducated, low-brow hellscape.  So, the only answer I could give at the time was, “Keep them alive until they are 18, when that becomes their problem.” It wasn’t bad advice, but it was way incomplete. 

Humans overthink almost everything, which is a real problem for the below-average half of every human population who don’t have a primate’s capacity for thinking under any condition and any subject.  Animals, especially birds capable of flight, know the parenting job is to keep the kids alive until they can fend for themselves and, then, make them leave the nest and discover how their wings work, or not.  That’s the whole job.  Obviously, some parents do a spectacular job of equipping their offspring with an ability to fly, fend for themselves, find a suitable mate and procreate the next generation, and live lives of meaning and value.  But most of us have no idea how to manage any of that for ourselves, let alone teach our kids those skills, and most of us do a pitiful job of the most basic task of parenting (see the bold print earlier in this paragraph). 

Contrary to popular myth, historically the absolute worst parents in human history are rural parents; particularly farmers.  Most modern people have totally forgotten how critical it was for a farmer’s wife to bear children, particularly sons.  That wasn’t because those men wanted to raise strong, independent, well-educated sons to make the world a better place.  It was because farmers wanted the free labor that sons represented and, typically, only the most independent, intelligent, and courageous of those litters of dumb farm boys managed to leave home and make a life for themselves.  The majority of farm boys stayed home until technology, competition from other farm boys, or a bank repossession made their unskilled labor necessary.  That is why, in the 21^st Century, the rural states and rural areas of urban states are overwhelmingly Republican voters, living in poverty, uneducated by several grade levels in comparison with urban citizens, illiterate, and spectacularly dependent on urban welfare while imagining themselves to be “simple farmers .  .  .  people of the land.  The common clay of the new West.  You know...  morons.” (When I saw “Blazing Saddles” the first time, I finished Wilder’s last sentence in perfect time with the film dialog.  I grew up surrounded by Kansas “morons” and from about age 15 on no stupid, evil thing they ever did surprised me.)

So, the reason being a parent sucks is because as much as we desperately love, cherish, and crave the company of our kids as they approach adulthood and become the people we hoped they might be, the job is to make them uncomfortable enough to leave the nest and get on with their independent lives.  That is the final, painful task of every parent and the part where most fail.  And the biggest reason for that failure is that most of us have no idea how to prepare our kids to make that leap and we have every incentive to avoid doing that work until it is too late.   Most of us, at least in the Midwest, come from several generations of parents who follow the model of the worst farm families.  Although I met several people, highly successful people, in California who came from at least a couple generations of urban life and whose parents, especially fathers, were the worst possible parents.  An incredible number of fathers are not only pissed off that their sons didn’t become unpaid employees for life but are jealous of their sons’ successes to the point of often engaging in sabotage.  It’s tough to beat that for a model of failed parent: someone who intentionally tries to keep their kid down to their own level of personal failure and dissatisfaction.  I suspect a lot of the people reading this will be squirming because either their parents followed this example or they have been doing it themselves.  It is not even a little bit unusual. 

If I could tell my uncomfortable, self-doubting 1980’s-self anything today, it would be, “You did suck as a father, but you did manage to help raise two competent and independent, brilliant, generous, literate women who are living enviable lives and who parented children with far more insight and skill than you ever demonstrated.” That does not mean that I did something, anything, right, but it does prove that, if you get the fuck out of the way and provide a little safe harbor when those early attempts at flight fail, your kids have a half-decent attempt at parenting themselves and turning out to improvements on their parents in every way.

But why would anyone want to take on a job like that?  Someone recently tried to convince me that our purpose, as human animals, is to procreate and reproduce our special genes.  With more than 8 billion of us polluting, over-populating the planet and fighting each other for every half-habitable square inch of the place, I think that job is done.  There is zero evidence that people with kids live any sort of happier life and lots of evidence to the contrary.

[The current head cheerleader for overpopulation is the world’s most deplorable man, Elon “Space Nazi” Musk and it’s hard to imagine a human being with more reason to be happy who clearly is insecure, miserable and miserly, desperate for positive attention, and for whom nothing will ever be enough. And he’s spewing out offspring (12 with 3 women, at the current count) like an alley tomcat, with almost exactly the same parental skill and attention. I won’t be surprised if he eats one of his several mate’s children from a different male, in some kind of primal competitive frenzy. Seriously, that wouldn’t surprise me even a little.]

Evolution and endorphins certainly make humans “feel happier” when their kids are small, but when the kids turn into teenagers, that all goes to hell faster than a fat man can stuff Big Macs into his gullet.  For some parents, mostly fathers, that initial rush dies a lot faster.  From that moment on, parenting is not much more than a matter of hanging on, keeping them alive, and trying to make “home” less home-like so their little monsters will be encouraged to get the fuck out and start living their own lives.  Often part of that process results in the parents also becoming less comfortable with their own home and splitting up (especially true for parents of daughters).  The funniest reaction to the discomfort of living with teenagers is that late parenting period when, suddenly, a more-than-adequate home starts to feel cramped and the family moves from a reasonable house to a 5,000 square foot mausoleum where there still isn’t enough distance from the pimply monsters, but now the little bastards are practically living in their own homes and have zero motivation to leave.  When and if they do finally leave, the parents are stuck with a gigantic house full of expensive crap, an outrageous mortgage and utility bills that would bankrupt a small business.  

By far, the best approach at this point in life is to start downsizing the day the last kid leaves high school.  Start looking at apartments in really boring senior housing, even if you aren’t over-55.  Put the house up for sale at a higher-than-market price and make a point of showing the kids’ rooms to prospective buyers before letting them see the rest of the house.  That way, if the buyers aren’t interested, you will have made the point to your failure-to-launch offspring and made them uncomfortable as a side benefit.  Start remodeling the kids’ rooms first, in preparation for the sale. If you have spare bedrooms, this might be the time to invite your own parents to move in while your own children can serve as grandpa’s caretaker and diaper-changer. Some adult birds stop cleaning up after the chicks, letting the nest fill with bird crap and even making contributions of their own, to make the nest less inviting.  I would not consider that to be extreme behavior as opposed to being stuck at home with a spoiled man-child like Jacob Chansley (QANON-sense “Buffalo-head boy”) who needed special food in prison after trying to overthrow the US government on January 6, 2021. I’d crap in that scumbag’s bed to get him out of my house.

When I was breeding age, the biggest reason many of my Midwestern peers gave for having kids was “My mother desperately wants to be a grandparent.”  No, she desperately wants you to be as miserable as she was when you were a teenager and she wants to live long enough to see that happen to you.  The later you wait to have kids, the less likely she is to see you miserable. That is your mother’s entire motivation for nagging you to reproduce.  

THE EMERGENCY

by Thomas Day

Fifty  years ago, I left my family.  I left them in good shape.  We were renting a small house in a small town in eastern Nebraska.  They had money and money coming in.  I had worked out a deal with the Unemployment Insurance people where I would send out resumes and they would give me money for the next six months, unless I found employment before then.  Ms Day only had to send in a card every week to receive one hundred and sixty dollars a week.  I had made up the cards.  I had filled out the resumes.  Ms Day  only had to open an envelope from Unemployment every week and check a block and add the names of the companies I had written resumes to and put the resumes in the mail along with the Unemployment envelope.  Easy. My plan was to be back in Nebraska in about a month and everything would return to “normal” while I got serious about looking for work.

I left my family in this condition and I would board a Greyhound bus for the west coast.  With a stop in the Grand Canyon on the way.  Ms Day and I were not enjoying each other's company and this seemed like the obvious way to solve that conflict.  I would leave and she would stay.  When my unemployment ran out, in 26 weeks, we'd reconsider our lives together.  I'd come back, if that is what we decided I should do. I’d be on my own, if that was our decision.

So I left.  I loaded up a backpack with food, camping stuff, a few books, and a note pad.  I boarded the Greyhound bus and went west as a young man, temporarily, with no obligations.  I rode and wrote for a thousand miles until I got to Flagstaff.  I wrote about how my life had not worked out to much of anything I would have chosen, I had not actively made any choices.  Mostly I had spend the past six years reacting to what came.  But now, I was heading west and I had intentionally picked that direction and that action. 

At Flagstaff, I left the bus depot and hiked and hitchhiked the 80 miles to the Canyon.  I’d left Nebraska a few days after Xmas and it was solidly winter in northern Arizona. I was used to the cold, my gear was good, and I was young and motivated to see this American wonderland. At the Canyon, I hiked down to the bottom at the Bright Angel Campground with two three day passes and enough reading material to stay busy for five days, easy. 

At the bottom, I set up camp, bought some candy bars from the park's canteen near the campground.  I met my neighbors: a pair of English campers, a pair of Texas campers, a pair of traveling friends from California and New York, and guy from Michigan who didn't have a decent sleeping bag or any kind of tent.  This was January and, although the Canyon is mostly desert on the bottom, it still gets cold and, sometimes, wet.  That night it snowed a few inches and I ended up sharing my tent with the guy from Michigan who was wet, cold, and very tense.  The next morning he bagged up his stuff and headed for the top of the Canyon, where a tour bus would take him to a motel room.

I had my tent back to myself and I picked out a book and started to read.  A ranger appeared at my tent flap, a few hours after sundown on the second night. He handed me a message from my wife.  It said, "Call home.  Emergency."  I put my boots and pants on, dug out my flashlight, and started out for the telephone at the canteen. 

I could get to the canteen one of two ways.  I could walk back toward the river and cross a small stream over a footbridge or I could cross the stream near the canteen on a rock bridge that fishermen had built by throwing rocks into the stream at irregular intervals.  Because it was an "emergency" I decided to go the short, but risky route, the rock bridge.

I have the balance of a tipsy debutante.  It's true.  If I had to wear high heels, I'd spend my life crawling.  I once did an Outward bound class where I had to cross streams on log bridges and I crossed most of those bridges on my hands and knees.  It got a lot of laughs from my other class members, but I stayed dry.  Everyone else did too, but they weren't me and they just walked across those logs.  They, also, didn't have trouble standing still at a bus stop because their sense of balance allowed them to stand still and stay upright.  Sort of like a shark and his defective gill mechanism, I move to stay upright. If I stand still for long, I fall over.

Anyway, I decided to take the hard, but fast route, to the telephone: across the rock bridge.  When I call this a bridge, you must understand that I mean it was a pile of loose rocks, strewn across a fifteen foot wide, two foot deep stream.  All kinds of people used that bridge to get across the stream through the day.  I saw them.  I watched with envy.  I knew it was possible, but probably not for me.  But now, in an "emergency," I knew I had to do it, to cross the rock bridge.  I stood at the foot of the bridge and shined my flashlight across the rocks.  I tested my balance.  My hiking shoes were loose because I had only pulled them on.  I hadn't laced them up tight because I was in a hurry, answering an "emergency."  They wobbled when I walked and they shifted, side to side, when I tested my balance on the edge of the stream.  I left them loose.

I stepped out on the first rock.  It was not solid in the stream.  It was big, but it rocked a bit.  I swung my left foot toward the second rock in the bridge “structure.”  It was less solid and smaller.  I shifted my weight from the first rock and pivoted slightly to my left to go for the third rock.  I didn't make it.  The second rock rocked a little.  I panicked and tried to go back to the first rock and ended up sitting in the middle of the stream with water running over the middle of my back.  Very cold water.  I tried to jump up and get my butt out of the coldest sitts-bath known to humanity and slipped again.  This time I felt something tear in my groin.  Not cloth, but something like a tendon.  My groin and tendon were very cold, though, and it didn't hurt.  It just felt a lot less strong than it had the moment before.  The only pain I felt was the pain of being very cold.  I crawled out of the stream and pulled myself up the opposite bank.  When I stood, the groin muscle hurt quite a bit.  I was still very cold and I still had an "emergency" to deal with.  I walked, hobbled, to the telephone.  Being wet and exposed to a thirty degree environment increased my misery. 

I dialed my home number and my wife answered, "Tom, I didn't expect you to call until next week.  The lady at the ranger station said you had just gone into the canyon and wouldn't be back for five more days.  So what's up?  How is the trip going?"

"I got a note that says you had an emergency.  For me to call home.  The ranger gave it to me at my tent tonight."

"Oh, I'm sorry.  There's no emergency.  I just asked the lady ranger to have you call home when you got out of the canyon.  I said it was no emergency" (my italics, I've been putting italics on that word for fifty years, every time I tell this story).

I was calm, contained, reasonable.  I said, "I just fell into a freezing stream, broke my leg, and crawled a hundred yards to call you about an emergency and it was no emergency?  How the fuck am I going to get out of this place now?  I'm crippled!  Now there is an emergency, Me!" 

I continued in a calm, contained, reasonable manner like that for a few more seconds describing my injury and how it happened and what was going to happen to me after I ran out of food in the bottom of the Grand Canyon, crippled by a broken leg and pneumonia, before she interrupted me. "Tom, I'm sorry.  I did say it was no emergency.  The ranger said she would post a note on the bulletin board for you to call home; when you got back out of the canyon.  I don't know why they decided to make it an emergency, but you should go back to your tent and take care of your leg.  Don't go back the same way you came.  Hear me?  Go back to the real bridge."  In my calm, contained, and reasonable manner I had told her about the good and bad bridges and why, in my incredible sacrifice for my family and their "emergency," I had decided to cross the bad bridge.

We said goodbye.  I made it sound like, now, I was the "emergency" and like I might need a helicopter to get me out of this mess.  I went back to my tent.  The same way I came.  I was limping badly and hurting with every step.  The extra two hundred yards to get to and cross the real bridge was more pain than I was ready for.  I was already wet and hurt, so what more could the rocks do to me?  It turned out that they could do noting to me.  I walked over that bridge like it was the Golden Gate, pissing and moaning and thinking about how miserable I was going to be with a broken leg, in a tent, in wet clothes, at the bottom of the Grand Canyon in the early January, stuck until I starved. I struggled into my tent, pulled off my filled-with-water-boots after a great struggle mostly with my bum groin hurting like hell every time I tried to get to my right boot.  I know, today, that I had strained, or torn, my right groin ligament or tendon.  It also still hurt to remember what it felt like back then for at least 20 more years.  Back in the tent, I thought I had castrated myself and broken my leg.  It took me nearly an hour to get the wet clothes off and some dry ones on.  I was a Picasso shade of gray-blue by the time I pulled my damp sleeping bag over my head and shivered myself to sleep.

The next morning, the sky was clear and the sun was melting the first snow that my local ranger had ever seen on the bottom of the Canyon, in his ten years as a ranger.  I couldn't get out of my sleeping bag.  My right leg was so stiff that it wouldn't bend even enough for me to get to the bottom half of the bag's zipper.  I knew starvation was my fate.  After a few moments of reflection, I pulled some dehydrated soup from my pack and made breakfast on my gas stove. 

I found some liniment and rubbed it all over my thigh.  It was a big tube and I was sure to die of starvation before I ran out of liniment, so I was liberal with the medication.  Soon, my tent stunk like a little school high school locker room after a big school football team had massacred the little school.  And my leg was on fire.  And I felt little if no pain.  If all that stuff does is distract you from the real source of your problems, that is enough.  That bit of distraction allowed me to fall back to sleep for most of the morning.  When I came back to life, the leg would move a little without causing me to scream or bite my tongue off not screaming.  So I ate some more.  And read some of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and some of Twain’s Roughing It and, when it got dark, I went back to sleep.

On my fourth day in the Canyon, I decided to see some of the place so I could say I had done more than just sleep, eat, and read there.  I fought my way dressed and struggled out of the tent, which was so liniment infested that my nearest camping neighbor was as far from my tent as they could be and still be in the legal campground.  You could almost see the fumes rising from the tent's ventilation.  I wasn't worried.  I still a had half-tube of the stuff for the last two days of camping and hiking. 

I found a stick to use for a cane and set off to explore the Canyon rim that I hadn't come in on.  I made it about a quarter mile before I ran into a section of the trail that had been landslid into oblivion.  I tried to navigate that pile of rocks and reinjured my groin.  Not bad, but enough to make me turn back and admit defeat.  I was not going to do much spectating at the bottom of the Canyon.  I went back to the Stream of Injury and contemplated my past and future for the rest of the day.

That night I finished off the tube of liniment.  I spread it all over my inner thigh.  Some very sensitive tissue lives on the inside of your thigh and once again I was on fire.  And it still felt much better than the sprung stuff inside the thigh did before I applied the liniment.  I went to sleep with my leg happily smoking inside the sleeping bag.

The next morning, the leg felt a little better than the previous morning and I was out of time in the Canyon.  I pulled my stuff out of the tent, tore my home down, and stuffed everything I had in the world into my backpack.  As usual, the things I had taken out of the bag didn't seem to fit back into it.  Even after I had consumed a fair quantity of food that took up some of the space I, now, couldn't find.  I found the space after a lot of rearranging and hauled the pack up to my back.  I carefully tested my leg for strength and pain and it seemed to work.  

At 6:00 a.m. I was heading up the seven mile trek to the rim of the Canyon.  By 9:00 a.m. I was in trouble.  The climb to the top of the Canyon is a steep and steady grade and my leg was trashed within three hours of careful and intermittent walking.  I had tried to take it easy and rest regularly, but it didn't help.  To make life more complex, my left leg was going away from compensating for the right one.  I was getting the same kind of injury in my good leg.  By 10:00 a.m. I was resorting to eyeballing the next close resting spot and forcing my two bum legs to carry me to that spot, usually within fifty to one hundred feet.  At this rate of progress, seven miles would take a few days to hobble-hike. 

I kept at it all day. Hiking a few yards and resting with the weight off of the legs.  The right leg was still much worse than the left so I had some energy and locomotion left, but the sun was going down and so was I by mid-afternoon.  The two guys from New York and California had left the campground after me and passed me a bit earlier, but they were taking a break and I caught up with them.  They were about to take off again when I came hobbling up to their coffee break. 

"You look beat.  You OK?"  The guy from New York asked.

"You're kidding?  Me tired?  I never felt better, except when I broke my ribs and ripped out most of the stuff that holds ribs in the places where they are supposed to be," I said, with all the friendliness and community spirit that Charles Manson brought to his midnight surprise parties. 

The east and west coasters looked at each other and started to pack up their gear so that I could be miserable in peace.  And I would have been, miserable, if they hadn't noticed that I was walking at an angle different than the lie of the land.  "You're hurt?  What did you do?", the guy from California asked.

"You wouldn't believe it if I told you.  I don't believe it," this time his sympathy mellowed my out to the Committee to Reelect Richard Nixon level of belligerence.  No, I was still nicer than that.  I was down to feeling sorry for myself instead of pissed at the universe that had caused me to be born with no coordination and no sense of balance.  "I think I tore something in my right leg and this hill is tearing up the same thing in the other leg."

"You want help?", said the New York guy.

"I don't know what you could do.  I'm to fat to carry and you already have plenty on your backs with your own packs.  Thanks for asking."

The New York guy grabbed my pack by the frame and lifted, "You have a lot more weight in your bag than I'm carrying.  We could switch bags.  You could wear mine."

I was losing more that a quarter century's indoctrination in one afternoon.  I didn't know what to say.  Had I been lied to by my Midwestern education?  By television?  By Hollywood?  Could someone from New York even know how to help someone?  Maybe he thought that since my bag was bigger than his, it was worth more than his and he would take off with it, leaving me to his stuff.  That didn't make sense.  Why not toss me off the cliff we were standing on and take the good stuff, if that was what he wanted?  I was left with the New York Good Samaritan theory and while he was hefting my life's possessions on to his back and loading his pack on my back, my view of human relations as determined by place of birth was as mangled as my groin. 

His pack was a lot lighter than mine.  I suppose he hadn't carried six month's worth of reading material into a two mile deep canyon.  I had.  He probably didn't have a month of  clothes in his pack either.  I did.  Or the things he might need to set up an apartment and a new life.  I had some of that, too.

We walked, talked, and rested for the last two miles of the canyon rim trail.  They could have made it to the top in an hour without me, but it took five more hours with me.  It started snowing soon after we started walking together and the temperature dropped almost ten degrees each hour that we walked. 

The last half mile was the worst for me.  Neither leg worked.  I was dragging my right leg with my seized up left leg.  The guy from California carried the guy from New York's pack in his arms while I struggled to carry myself.  We rarely walked more than a few feet between me saying, "Go on without me.  You're going to freeze here.  It's dark.  My legs don't work.  Go on.  I'll set my tent up here and sleep this off.  Go on."

They patiently listened to me.  Waited for me to get up and go on a few more feet.  I managed to walk the last one hundred yards without stopping.  If you can call the pace I was moving, walking.  I could see the end.  I was so disgusted with myself for being so fallible and for keeping these incredible examples of humanity out in the cold for so many hours that they didn't deserve.  I forced my legs to keep moving until we got to the New York guy's car.

I sat in his car while the two friends said goodbye.  It turned out that they had met at the top of the Canyon five days earlier and decided to walk down together.  The California guy was going back home.  It was too cold for him to even consider staying in a motel in Flagstaff, even if I was paying for it.  He wanted to get back to some natural heat, fast.  The New York guy was a lot more wore out from having to carry his own gear and the other guy's gear for the last mile of the trail.  He accepted my offer of a night in a motel in Flagstaff in exchange for a ride back down the mountain to Flagstaff.

We drove to Flagstaff.  I stopped at a convenience store and bought more liniment.  When we found a motel, I paid for the room and we found it.  He took a hot shower and crashed.  I filled the tub with scalding water, smeared most of the tube of liniment on my legs, and went to sleep in the tub.  I woke up a few times to reheat the water and spent the night submersed.  The next morning he asked me, through the door, if I was OK.  I told him not to worry about me, I was mutating into a frog with two sauteed frog legs.  He left for New York and I stayed in the tub until check out time.

I was probably in some kind of shock when we finally made it to the top of the Canyon.  I can't remember the names of either of my fellow hikers, or, more accurately, my rescuers.  I wouldn't even recognize them if I saw them in my own home.  I might recognize them if I saw them carrying my eighty pound pack or two thirty pound packs, one in arms and one in the usual position. 

I did revise my opinions of people from the coasts and, when I continued my trip to San Francisco to locate my wife's missing brother, I was well served by my new opinion of California people.  A police clerk helped me locate his home through his car registrations.  A guy with a diamond in the middle of one front tooth offered me a job while I sat next to him on the bus.  Another guy introduced me to Hatha yoga in Golden Gate Park. 

I had my sabbatical and went back home to my wife and kids.  A few months later, I got my old job back when they rehired the first group of people they had laid off.  I went on with my life.  This all happened almost fifty years ago, but I still feel a need to get even.  I'm still way behind the east and west coasts in debt.  Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard said something about not being a "borrower or lender" and I have spend a lot of my life avoiding those categories.  But I am still waiting for an opportunity to pay back a guy from New York and a guy from California for helping me get to the top of the Grand Canyon.  Poor Richard also said that "Creditors have better memories than debtors," but, in this case, I doubt it.  I'd guess that the California guy and the New York guy have completely forgotten about me, but I will never forget them.

 

     The End

Living Behind A Mask

I was going to title this “What’s it like being an atheist in the hyper-superstitious US Midwest?” but that was too long and the title I chose answers that question in a nutshell. For the majority of my 76 years, I’ve had to waste far too much time idling away the minutes after some arrogant nutjob mutters “Let’s pray.” One of my fondest memories of living in southern California for almost 10 years was that never happened one single time. Midwestern faux-Christians might squall about the “godless heathens on the left coast,” but I’d just call that good manners. I found no shortage of religious people in southern California, but for the most part they were not particularly fragile types who required me to pretend along with them to maintain their faith.

If you are a superstitious Christian tribalist/primate-trooper, you might imagine that Californians are harboring “deep feelings of fear and guilt from a sinful life and turning [their] back on God,” but you’d be as nutty as usual. It’s impossible to “turn your back” on an omniscient imaginary friend, for one thing; if he’s everywhere that would be physically impossible. But, mostly, the Californians I knew were incredibly hard-working, talented, and driven people who were trying to live their lives as best they could.

Before the Reagan Revolution did its permanent damage to the California education system, the highest percentage of adults I’ve ever known were taking night classes at the community colleges and the many University of California facilities, working one or many side hustles, trying to improve their neighborhoods and communities, and enjoying the best weather and recreational opportunities in the country. The mega-churches were still stuffed with Midwestern robo-people, but it wasn’t hard to find people who had useful things to do. Outside of a few marginally civilized cities, the Midwest is nothing like that. And I lived in Orange County, the L.A. area’s most conservative nuthouse! The more rational parts of the state are even less infected with delusional Christian cults.

What it’s mostly like living in the Midwest, especially in the burbs or rural areas is lonely. It’s also scary because the one thing the followers of “the prince of peace” are best known for is intolerance and violence. Humans, like most other primates, are a herd animal. Chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and monkeys live in “troops.” Although orangutans are mostly solitary animals, just watching freeway traffic will make it pretty obvious that humans are inclined to pile up in tightly packed herds, even when we are going nowhere. Put generously, we’re a “social animal,” more honestly we’re a herd animal easily spooked into following the lead steer over a cliff.

All religion is about producing conformity, but Christianity and the other Abrahamic religions and cults are about forcible conformity. So it is entertaining, at best, and incredibly disappointing, more accurately, to hear someone whining about atheists asking some sect of the Christian cult to behave at least marginally-legally and morally. The US version of Christianity has been as ruthless, ethnocentric, racist, and self-centered as any cult in the history of humanity. That is not to imply that Christians have behaved particularly well since the Roman emperor Constantine commissioned the first edition of the Christian Bible and invented Christianity in 330 CE.

The fact that the majority purporting to be Christian (representing 68% of the US population) could be terrorized by the miniscule 4% of the population representing atheists should be hilarious, but it is mostly disturbing. Christianity is a religion based on conformity of thought and speech, not necessarily actions. From simple observation, it is clear that those Christians are so shaky in their faith that they require universal conformity to cling to their fragile beliefs. As one academic author explained, “The Church so fiercely opposed heretics, i.e. those who did not conform to the articles of faith that they espoused, because they believed that their existence threatened society and would undermine the Church.”

So, those of us who aren’t terrified by our mortality and gave up on Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, fairies and angels, demons and fire-breathing dragons, and other imaginary terrors are forced to try to be invisible in this fading empire of superstition, kleptocracy and capitalist feudalism. I have lived in western Kansas, north Texas, rural and urban Nebraska, urban California, suburban Colorado, urban and rural Minnesota and the only place I felt I was safe without my constant mask of anonymity was California. If I could have afforded to stay there, I would still be there. Nobody moves to places like everywhere-else-I-have-lived because they want to be there. If we all had the necessary skills, motivation, and drive to be in California, we’d be there. We pick lessor places because they are easier, the competition is less fierce, the standards of performance are practically non-existent in rural areas. That makes the place where I currently live less demanding, but far more lonely.