Moral Outages

I am typing this article on a laptop deprived of its power-source. It operates gracefully on battery power, but, when that lithium battery is exhausted, I will be deprived of its use. You see, I am enjoying day two of a power outage provided compliments of a certain Irene. While she hardly packed the punch of which some warned, she nonetheless crippled the power grid here in the Nutmeg State. My dear wife and I are therefore making due in a much more primitive world: all of our gadgets are virtually useless. My small Honda generator provides some power to preserve our limited stock of food in our refrigerator and we have, by and large, returned to a world without modern convenience. That Hurricane Irene slammed into the Northeast on the tail of what was one of the worst three weeks in recent market memory would seem to be pure happenstance. But given my tendency to read symbols and signs into a host of seemingly unrelated phenomena, perhaps, just perhaps, the Good Lord is giving His faithful just one more chance to prepare before the coming economic and social collapse.

I am a professional; a vaulted member of the learned class. I practice law. Other people work for a living, but I practice it. Like doctors, we lawyers are a rarified group. And I do not just practice law, I practice it in the New York metropolitan area so I am not only a fancy lawyer, I am New York fancy. I have no idea how most stuff works and I would last no more than two or three days if you dropped me a remote forest but I have developed a good sense of the varieties of wine, what not to order off an Indian menu and how to participate in several dozen conference calls in a week. What separates me from my fellow professional class is not my survival skills, it is that I am traditional Catholic with six children who cannot seem to divest myself of the view that the world as we have known it -- the world of our parents and grandparents -- is about to collapse. If there really were a social and economic collapse, these skills will be less valuable.

I have this dream, silly though it may be, that one day I will buy land in upstate New York (my ancestral homeland) and live with one foot off of the grid, with some chickens, a cow or two, maybe a goat and twenty chord of firewood -- all while still somehow managing to keep my day-job downstate (as we used to call it). As my more experienced friends remind me, I know nothing about animals or farming and it is a lot harder than it looks. I cannot disagree. There is no doubt that this dream is a half-baked idea that I have shared with numerous “back to the land” intellectuals. From Walden to Belloc, the idea of escaping the “cog-ness” of modern professional existence runs deep in my romantic blood. I am willing to submit it is romance and perhaps nonsense in normal times but are we living in normal times? Whether the elite puppet-masters who orchestrate our “free” lives in the West like it or not, economics can never be divorced from morality -- indeed, economics is morality. That we as a nation could embrace a pornographic and infanticidal ideals (just to name a few) and still create an honest and hardworking citizenry is insane. And the idea that we could simply paper over the moral degradation of an entire nation by printing more money ad infinitum speaks for itself. I do not pretend to be an expert in these things -- indeed, I am an expert in almost nothing (and certainly nothing useful), but the moral implosion we have seen in the last fifty years has to be seen as bread crumbs on a trail leading to the ultimate destination of economic and social apocalypse (I refuse to speculate on whether it will be any other type of apocalypse).

In light of what appears to be the undeniable facts on the ground, maybe it is time I really explore preparing for what seems less likely a contingency, but rather a virtual eventuality. Maybe I need to buy my farmstead. Maybe my wife needs to learn how to sew -- and with an off-grid loom. Maybe my children should learn how to can vegetables while they learn Latin or The Iliad. Maybe it is time to say goodbye to the world “downstate” and begin the preparations for surely what is coming next. What keeps me here -- it is not the cultural opportunities, enlightened neighbors or sports teams -- no, it is a first rate traditional Catholic community for whom I have learned to love. Christian families that have become more relevant than my own blood relatives populated by devout little children that my children love and cherish. It is also a community filled with holy traditional Catholic priests that preach the Gospel Truth without compromise. It is a community that would be very, very hard to leave. Indeed, solid communities do not grow on trees. But there are nonetheless vulnerabilities staying here; in one of the more expensive places in the United States. If my two day sojourn without power is any indication, those vulnerabilities will become manifest in such a crisis.

How do you do it? How do you uproot your wife and children from a wonderful traditional Catholic community to put into practice an idea? It does not matter to them that I cannot afford a home here (notwithstanding my lofty practice) that fits my family or that I will never be able to afford enough land to have animals and a few rows of crops. Or further that the cost structure of “downstate” is completely rigged against me and those like me -- that it is meant for double-incomes. Single incomes with families (especially large ones) like me are not wanted here.

The truth is that I am not going anywhere. Perhaps I will have the consolation of saying I told you so, but, even now, the specter of saying as much does not have much appeal. Well, perhaps I will simply have to prepare here as much as the idea of freeze dried food is unappealing to me. To be utterly frank, I am frightened about what comes next. If it were just me, I would be less so. If anything, I have been a survivor (even if not a woodsman). But when you factor in a wife and children (and small ones at that), you are weighed down, you are slowed down. But these are forces outside of of my control, but unlike my “colleagues” wedded to dialectical materialism (even if they have no idea of its title), I at least know how this thing ends. In the ineffable glory of the Trinity.

So I wrote one thousand words to say very little. Now you can be assured I had a first class legal education.