Tourist Syndrome as a Feature, Not a Fault

"Learn to renounce your own will in many things, if you want to live in peace and harmony with others. It is no small matter to live in a monastery, or in a congregation, without expressing complaints, and to persevere faithfully until death. Blessed are they who have done this well and reached the end of their lives in happiness. If you want to comport yourself well and continually make progress, consider yourself an exile and a pilgrim upon earth."

Thomas à Kempis

I'm not sure there's a hard, fast definition of "Tourist Syndrome". I looked it up and found patchy references to such a thing. Google wants me to make it "Tourette syndrome"!

But one definition I found fit what I had in mind; it referred to "looseness of attachment". That about captures it. To me, tourist syndrome is that ability to find local habits and culture amusing, provided you're only staying for a little while. You can even live somewhere for a number of months and still hold onto this perspective.

But after a year, it just cannot hold. You start to get irritable and despise those "cute" things that are now driving you nuts.

And I think there's something to be gleaned, spiritually, from all of this. We can tolerate a day, a month, even half a year, perhaps, of weirdness: just so long as the rest of our life feels untroubled by what we are encountering. But as soon as the irritant starts feeling like part of the fabric of what we'll be experiencing indefinitely, well that's a problem.

But what we read in 2 Peter 2 ("I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires...") and what we read in the opening quote suggest that Tourist Syndrome, applied appropriately, is precisely what we need for this life. We need to remember that "it's just a short stay."

When we remember that our visit to this planet in these frail bodies is bounded by some pretty strict time constraints, and that eternity is, well, a bit longer than that, we can more easily be gracious with the locals. Endure more hardships with a cheery disposition. Avoid the sins that entrap us.

Now on the one hand, this observation is not new and described well enough elsewhere. I've not discovered new lands, here. On the other, I know for a fact that I'm nowhere near applying these truths to my life. I am acting, most of the time, like an entitled foreigner stuck here with some irritating locals. 

What's ironic about it all is that I'm part of the irritating landscape that others here have to deal with. Some of them consider me to be the problem. And they're not wrong.

So I wrote up this reflection as an admonition to myself. Try to be a more gracious tourist, Pilgrim. The trip will be more enjoyable if I do. For me. And for the other tourists.

Open Source Software, Christian Faith, and Trump

I don't have time to do this post justice, but I will jot down a few ideas. With apologies, this ain't gonna be a polished esssay.

It's interesting how Evangelical Christians are so worked up in their fears regarding socialism that they will vote for Trump. That one word. Trump. It must stand in place for all that is known about the man, and I have made my opinions on the man clear elsewhere. I'll spare all (myself included) the rant.

That one word. Socialism. I'm actually warming up to it a bit of late--in certain regards. But let me walk that back a bit. Communism is a disaster of epic proportions. Socialism (such as seen in Venezuela) is not far behind, unless we're counting corpses, in which case Maduro has a ways to go before he catches up with the tens of millions of people who died under Stalin and Mao.

So, No, (Um, make that NoOOOooOOOOooooOO!) I'm not here to sell socialism proper.

But that said, Luke's description of the early church in Acts is distinctly socialist in flavor. But with Jesus in charge, and people supporting the cause voluntarily.

Pivot point. As I look at my life in recent years, I'm struck by what has blessed me most, work-wise, and top of the list is OSS. FOSS, in fact. FREE Open Source Software.

That's kinda.... socialist-ish, don't ya think?

Yes, it is. Everyone shares in the spoils, and as is sadly often the case, not everyone shares in the labor.

I'll say that again, tangibly. I have contributed just a hair more than zero (0) lines of code to support FOSS. (I'll count a few documentation suggestions as good for one or two lines.) But I have benefited wildly from the stuff. Linux. ASP.NET Core. Visual Studio Code. PostgreSQL. GraphQL.NET. Dapper. How much time ya got? I could list ten more, easily. EASILY. I use this stuff all day long.

So what has this all got to do with anything? Well, it's a fact that we cannot all be superstars. But when the church does what it should be doing, I think the benefits can be a wee bit analogous to some of the benefits of FOSS. For starters, nothing is lost on God. Any efforts kicked in to make the church what it ought to be? There are rewards for that. God will not ever lose sight. We gain his approval. Is there anything better than God's approval to be had in this universe we inhabit?)

So when we serve, those we serve are blessed. And God notices.

That kinda reminds me of FOSS. Recipients are blessed mightily, and for free! But there are eventual rewards also for those who do FOSS. Recognition (and consulting income!) come to mind.

Anyway, I'll say no more here except to note that I live in a more and more socialist world, where software is concerned. And it's working a lot better than the one Microsoft dominated 30 years ago.

I think the church would do well to burnish its socialist credentials. The world would be a lot better off if it did.

And maybe evangelicals (don't count me under that name!!) will one day be forgiven for appointing Trump to the top job in 2016, if instead they stopped obsessing about socialism (which is not what Joe Biden is about) and voted for Biden in 2020.

They won't however. They'll vote for Trump. And so they won't be forgiven by history. If they're lucky, best case scenario is that their actions will be forgotten. By people, at any rate. But not by history and not by God.

I will have to answer for much when I face God, but one thing I don't envy many of my peers for is the fact that they will have to explain to God why they thought, twice in a row, that Trump was the best choice on the ballot. If it weren't sick and scary (and that will be a terrible moment, indeed), I'd suggest that I'd love to see the look on Jesus's face when they try. But really, that truly is a terrifying thought, once we're past the humor. God help the Evangelicals. Republican senators are fleeing the Trump ship like rats. Evangelicals are still sitting in the galley getting drunk.

"The fact that the rats are starting to abandon the sinking ship now doesn’t change what they did and who they are."

Those are fair words regarding Republican senators. But when the same words apply to churchgoers, it's time to find a nearby toilet.

So Joseph Biden will win. The nation will swing *toward* socialism from the freakishly dark and Nazi-ish tilt of the past four years. And that will be a good thing. And the pendulum will never get close to what's going down in Venezuela. It will eventually be recognized universally for the good shift that it was. And Evangelicals will be remembered (as we also remember the footage of whites spitting on blacks--or doing worse--in the 60's) for having tried to stop it from happening. Which brings me to pivot yet again back to FOSS.

"Former Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer once considered Linux users a bunch of communist thieves and saw open source itself as a cancer on Microsoft's intellectual property. But no more."

Ballmer eventually admitted that he was wrong. I doubt he ever admitted that his hatred for FOSS was driven by personal greed and ulterior motives. But he at least admitted that FOSS is not communism, but a rather benign and good form of socialism, so to speak.

I wonder if it will take Evangelical Trump-lovers twenty years to realize how wrong they were about him and in thinking Joseph Biden would be an even worse president. He won't. You heard it here first.

Joe Biden is not my hero. I'm pro-life, and he's not. He should be, as a practicing Catholic, but for political gains he has abandoned what his church preaches.

But neither Trump nor Joe is going to change the abortion scene in America. Let that sink in. Neither of them can change that scene. Americans will have their way. If we want change where abortion is concerned, we'll need to work on attitudes from the bottom up. Not laws from the top down. Isn't that an obvious home-spun truth straight from the book of Romans???

Meanwhile, Joe is a decent man who will help preserve democracy and respect for the constitution here in the USA. The same cannot be said for Trump on any of those counts. Not one. And this is... news? Yes. Twenty years from now the Evangelicals that voted for Trump today will cringe at the yellowed papers and try to say they never liked him. But many did. And even those who didn't... voted for him all the same. It will be remembered.

The Post article link above? I could have written it myself. Spot on. One comment at the bottom that I particular liked: "After May 1945, you could not find a single Nazi in all of Germany." Well, consider today to be "March, 1945". And by the year 2050, "June, 1945" will have reached full bloom. Trump will rank below Senator McCarthy and above Hitler in the annals of political figures. And it will be nearly impossible to find a single Evangelical in America. But when any are found, they'll just be ignored along with irrelevant Fundamentalists and Dispensationalists.... Which is a fitting fate for those who elected Trump because they feared being ignored.

[Sidebar note: People voted for McCarthy because they believed the shit he was serving up in the name of protecting America from Commies. But it turned out he wasn't protecting America from Commies. He was just amassing power by means of endless lies and skillful fear manipulation. Any similarity between McCarthy and Trump is strictly in the minds of those wise enough to see the parallels.]

You heard it all here first.