As acronyms go, it’s sort of in a class by itself, emerging when discussions about placement of a homeless shelter or a solar array come before local town councils and planning boards. Suddenly, landowners feel threatened and raise concerns about crime and plummeting property values and compromised sight lines.

Not in my back yard. Put it somewhere else— in someone else’s back yard.

Never mind that there are only so many back yards to work with, or that maybe we need to step back and think about what best benefits a community and not just me. Disinformation and assumptions sway opinions, and people can come across as being shortsighted and selfish.

If NIMBY were to always prevail, then opportunities would be left on the table, and needs left untended.

The whole Trump family and extended family remind me of people who get thrust into positions of authority and responsibility while having next to none of the tools needed to do the jobs. Privileged nepo babies with irrelevant resumes.

It’s like someone trained in accounting scrubbing in to do heart surgery, or a weekend tinkerer in the woodshop tackling a valve job on a Maserati, or someone who likes to take an occasional walk around the painted track at the Y deciding they can handle Half Dome without ropes.

None of these people have ever even slept at a Holiday Inn Express, never mind possess a sense of propriety or self-awareness or the wherewithal to handle delicate political matters, or capably function in situations that require insight and patience and an understanding of nuance, or the art of the dance.

They’re all in over their heads, out of their league. Plastic, self-involved, bloviating impostors, from Donald on down.  

What’s going to happen if Trump can’t secure a bond for $454 million?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. That’s what’s gonna happen.

Trump is a non-starter for me because he’s such a coarse, loudmouthed creep.

He’s way out of his element, whatever that is. He has no idea what he’s talking about when it comes to policy or anything else that matters. He probably has a vision—of prevailing and squirming free of all the indictments and winning another term and laying waste to the institutions that have sustained us since 1776.

He has no sense of history or governance, no patience, no desire to listen to anyone or take advice from anyone. His whole life has been a transactional scam.

Why would anyone want him to be President? There’s nothing there, except a gigantic ego and a wounded little boy.

Anyone else have an intolerance for wind? Incessant, gale force, making things rattle, cold air finding its way into the house through any little crack or crevice? It might just be the time of year, when cold temps get magnified by a stiff breeze, and the annoyance factor gets jacked up.

I should probably get a life.

What should we be doing with the 12 or 16 hours or so that we’re awake every day? On the one hand, I guess it’s nobody else’s business. On the other hand, it seems like we most days live oblivious to some strikingly serious developments unfolding around us, many having to do with climate.

Then there are the faraway plights of Gazans or Syrian refugees or African hunger or the hoards deciding they can’t live in Ecuador or Mexico or more far-flung places anymore.

Many of us are still trying to carry on as if none of those challenges matter to us, affect us, or are in any way things we can do anything about. We Americans are more concerned with the upcoming election between a decent octogenarian and an inept lowlife trying to avoid jail time, or what we’re gonna plant in the garden this year, who’s gonna prevail by the end of March Madness, the latest rev of GTA, or buying a few shares of a sleeper stock that’s getting some buzz.

Or putting food on the table, teaching the children well, or buying a new truck.

Anyway, sometimes it’s easy to get the feeling that we’ll notice the world is burning about the time it’s too late to do anything constructive about that.

The Harari book is filling my head with all sorts of thoughts regarding religion and its place in our world. What he says makes sense, even though it’s a bit difficult to read, as in hard to hear. And while what he says could be as much theory as anything else people postulate, it strikes me as having validity.

Harari pins a lot on our biological development and the characteristics and instincts encoded in our DNA. He doesn’t badmouth religion, but puts it in the category of the myth-making at which Homo Sapiens has become so proficient. Still, it has caused me to wonder about the various world religions, Christianity in particular.

First, if all religions are, in essence, made up—myths—what does this say about the level of deception being wrought on a large percentage of the world’s population? What does it say about the emotional and spiritual investment billions have made? What does it mean for truth, for the myriad ways religion has inspired and influenced our music and architecture and our daily conversations and behavior? And, lately, the political leanings and legislation and court decisions coming out of Washington and state governmental bodies?

Harari’s take on human development—especially the prominent place myth-making has held and continues to hold—is currently affecting the way I look at everything. I guess, in one sense, the myths and everything we’ve told ourselves about earthly life have done what they needed to do for us- given us guidelines and guard rails and reference points, not to mention hope. They’ve helped us navigate, for better or worse, in the absence of the built-in biological instruction manual that we apparently grew beyond a number of millennia ago.

But… all this has once again raised the question in my mind that I can’t shake. It may always be unanswerable, born of pretense and vanity, but also curiosity: what if Jesus existed and did the things the Bible said he did, and he is the One, the Savior of the world? What if Christianity is, among all the world’s religious movements, the one with historical precedence, historical validity?

And then I’m visited by the troubling– or humbling and grounding– fact that, outside of the scriptural witness, the only other place Jesus shows up is a measly paragraph from an ancient history book written by Josephus. And then I think about the myriad adherents of other religions asking similar questions, feeling similar ways about the prominent heroes of their faith. And I’m left standing no further along that path of enlightenment, which is probably also a myth.

I remember a conversation I had with one of the interns—vicars, they are called—who was at my home congregation for on-the-job training during his third year at seminary. I forget exactly how I worded it, but I asked him a question about the importance we held for our own Christian faith and how that squared with the rest of the world’s religions. What were we to make of the great diversity of religions and spiritual expressions that existed (and still exist) in the world?

I remember his answer being somewhat satisfying at the time: that this is apparently how God has chosen to speak to the people of earth, i.e. God speaks to different people in different ways.

I’ve more recently come to understand this response as a pastoral attempt at throwing spaghetti at the wall, an attempt at a diplomatic answer to an impossible question, or at least a question that can have no definitive answer, most likely because there isn’t one.

At best, we move through earthly life encountering an existential Babel, annoyed and confused by the diversity, maybe bewildered by the passion with which religious beliefs different from ours are embraced by so many people around the world. And I arrive back at the place I have lately found myself: religion is a salve, a construct–a myth– that helps us get through the day.

But it is also a pile of dry tinder, always capable of ignition, ready to engulf us in unspeakable and non-mythical oppression and violence and bloodshed, driving us to embrace some future hope, a heavenly home where all is resolved and forgiven, and life is good and eternal.

Which renders this current experience of consciousness, what– a trial run, a rough draft, proving grounds, a warm-up for the “real thing”?

That all seems convenient and somehow insulting, reflective of a certain futility and ignorance. Unrealistic and disappointing, too, more a seeing what sticks.

Anyway, signs are pointing to myth.

Still making my way through Sapiens, by Y. N. Harari, and trying to get my head around a theme, or one of the threads, running through the book.

I don’t know if it’s the right word, but biologically speaking, certain instincts are imprinted in our DNA, which manifest themselves in certain behaviors that we just know how to do. For example, the average bird knows it needs to build a nest out of certain materials and in certain places, and it hunts and gathers food for and sustains its young—things our human ancestors also had in their DNA and that we still have.

Alongside this “pre-programming” is a long list of other behaviors that are learned and conditioned, contextual and evolving, which seems to mostly apply to Homo Sapiens. Harari maintains that one of our species’ shortcomings is that whatever is preprogrammed in our DNA has only taken us so far, and that the speed at which we developed socially and in other ways outran the tools we have biologically.

Harari makes it sound like if the directions were in our DNA, we might have fewer issues with how we decide to label and organize ourselves, how and what and who we worship– if anyone– what makes for proper behavior, who has the power, who makes decisions, what’s important and has value, etc. This is where his emphasis on myth-making comes in. In the absence of hardwired directions, we humans create other guideposts and guidelines and expectations for behavior that are agreed upon by large groups of people.

I should probably stop before I get too far off course. Bottom line is that I think this discrepancy between DNA encoding and what we’ve had to come up with on our own is the basis for the often-calamitous disparities and differences that exist among us as citizens of Earth. We’ve had to wing it, in a sense, and we haven’t always made the right choices and decisions. We are still hunters and gatherers—foragers—who have found themselves thrust into roles and situations that have long taken us out of our element, demanded we think on our feet, just making stuff up as we go.  

Chuck Schumer could have not said anything. Then at least Republicans would have one less thing to which to overreact.

As it is, Schumer stuck his neck out and went there—called out Netanyahu and walked that thin line that is U.S. policy regarding what has been unfolding in Gaza since late October. Schumer tried to touch all the bases, prefaced his Bibi/new election haymaker with acknowledgments of his love for Israel and support for a two-state solution—a solution that has next to no chance of happening as long as Netanyahu is Prime Minister.

I’m not sure why I’ve chosen this as a topic to write about, but I think it has something to do with the feeling that Schumer didn’t say anything that a lot of people aren’t already thinking.

What galls me, and probably shouldn’t, is the Republican reaction to Schumer’s speech. Aged relic Mitch McConnell mustered enough breath to mouth that the Democratic party has an anti-Israel problem and that Schumer knifed the Jewish state in the back. Wow, reactive and graphic, though predictable. Others piled on.

This all reflects the moment and the pressure many are feeling and what people are seeing with their own eyes: Gazans are suffering beyond comprehension, and Israel, or perhaps more accurately, Netanyahu, seems not to care.

It lends credence to the theory in the early days of the war that Hamas could see all this coming, or at least envisioned perhaps this exact scenario—that Israel’s relentless and zero-tolerance response to the events of October 7 would eventually swing public sentiment against them and paint them into a corner.

There’s nothing wrong with having an education beyond high school. There’s nothing wrong with questioning the opinions and advice of one’s elders, of testing what one hears against what one has learned and seen after having engaged one’s surrounding cultures and maybe walked a mile in someone else’s shoes.

There’s nothing wrong with being well-traveled, or even a little bit traveled. It makes sense that one who has “been around,” seen something of the world, ventured beyond one’s yard or surrounding ZIP codes, is likely to have been exposed to other customs and cultures, other people, and walked away with a fuller picture of the diversity and differences—and similarities—between and among us.

This all appears to have some bearing on the dynamics that exist today, in terms of the fertile ground that people like Donald Trump and other vermin who peddle disinformation need in order to gain adherents. One begins to realize how much they depend on narrow world views and gullibility and grievance and an aversion to introspection.

People like Trump bank on ignorance and hope to find people who have already been terminally indoctrinated by their jaded elders and peers. They plow and sow in the fertile ground of anger and apathy, trusting that their screeds will be received as gospel. How else to explain an embrace of antisemitism, or an openness to isolationism, or a fear of immigrants?

Trump, Putin, and their ilk? They’re all predators.