I remember the day well, because some of my life changed because of it.
It was the final day that people would have to decide what fraternities (and sororities) they would pick. Having been a college athlete, I'd been rushed hard by the two most prestigious (arguably) fraternities on campus.
I'd befriended members of both. I'd made few friends in high school--a reality painfully brought home on our 50th reunion two Augusts ago--so I'd been busy developing more of my personality than my intellect. My grades were awful, but then, I didn't want to be there. I wanted to go to college somewhere else, but my dad wouldn't let me. Maybe subconsciously, I was rebelling.
So for a few months, I was living in this kind of bubble where I didn't have to make a choice, could casually chat up a whole bunch of people without consequence. That would have to come to an end.
I sat in the room where freshmen had to sign up for a certain fraternity, and I honestly didn't know what to do. The decision dangled. I knew, instinctively, that whatever fraternity I'd forsake, those guys would not be my friends, or at least as close as I thought they'd been. "Two roads diverged in a narrow wood".....
It didn't feel fair, but it was a way of showing that neither was life. I wanted to be everybody's friend. I didn't yet have the perspective to realize that, as a whole, a small liberal arts college was itself a protected little bubble that had little relation to the rest of the world.
I sat in a chair for several minutes, frozen. I knew I needed to do something, but I still didn't know what. It was torture. I was being painfully wishy-washy.
Then he walked in, and I knew: The guy who would eventually become my fraternity big brother. He casually chatted with the college staffer in charge of keeping track of all this, and I thought, well, if he took the trouble to be here, it meant that that fraternity would do absolutely everything it could to get absolutely everyone it wanted. That was slightly irrational, true, but I had no other cards to play with. The moment was upon me.
It wasn't a 'sign' so much as an indication. The choice was still mine. I concluded that many others had to make such decisions and their lives turned out all right, and I was no better than they were.
Plus (and this was a driving factor) guys who weren't in frats seemed to be (and this is small thinking, true, but I'm all of 18 years old here) not as cool as those who were--the notorious GDIs (god-damned independents, whose positions I would come to respect, admire and emulate later in life). Did I want to be uncool, especially after four years of high school in which I was both a jock and a nerd, successful at both but mostly a lonely loner?
I was determined: That was not going to happen to me again. Okay, it was unfair. But I would at least have some friends. Some were better than none. But I knew I needed friends, especially in a realm where I was drifting, undirected, non-driven, without clear goals.
I made my choice. As someone in the other frat (who knew I was twitching) suggested, I did so and did not look back. I tried at times to continue to befriend those in the other fraternity, but I became more comfortable with my choice as time moved on.
Did God put my eventual big brother in front of me so I could make my choice more clearly? Or was that just a nice coincidence?
Why would God act just for me? Why would I be so special? That was absurd. God, if one exists (and, though I belong to an organized religion, I also intellectually have to accept the possibility that there may not be one), doesn't choose to put all else aside and deal with any individual. Belief in that would take an ego the likes of which repels me.
I thought of all that when I watched "CBS Sunday Morning" yesterday. Ted Koppel, as was his wont, went into the hinterland of America and talked to people who still stand by 45. It was a very recent conversation: He had been diagnosed with Covid-19. They knew.
One lady insisted that God had made 45 president. Well, that clinched it for her. Whatever he did was all right. No discussion would matter: the border, our now-damaged international reputation, his taxes as opposed to hers, his tens of thousands of lies, his dodging of responsibility for the pandemic's spread. All irrelevant, or explainable by some kind of excuse-making.
She was unaffected by any of that. To her, he represented God's will, regardless of the substance. This divorce of one from the other spoke to the irrationality of her faith, not its solidity. He appears decisive and strong, but he's not.
He's weak and dithering, horribly insecure--as indicated in just one way by his insistence of being carted around the block in a limousine despite being sick. He's dismissively, even insistingly, unknowledgeable (even now, with nearly four years of experience) in the mechanics of governing or the Constitution.
So if God's at work here, it would have to be because he's exactly the wrong kind of person to be our president, and that we need to be taught a lesson. But I don't believe in that kind of God, either. If we have the free will to do the wrong thing, we have the free will to do the right thing, too.
If we have the intellect to devote to making the right choice, we also can ignore that intellect and become irrational--enough to choose this horrible person. It's all disappointingly human, which is what we have created in our government--and what 45 is busy destroying to try to dominate us.
And yes, he knows that. He wants to do exactly that. That, he can easily figure out because it involves himself--the only person he cares about--and it involves overpowering something, however superficially it happens.
So I'm making a choice to vote for Joe Biden. He'll be a decent president, though probably not an outstanding one. But I'll take that for now. He's a practicing Catholic, by the way. But he knows the difference between what God might do and what humans are capable of--for now, a better government. God can't put him in the White House, but we can.
Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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