Member-only story
This Is Us
Choose Your Own Reality
Our competing realities share one thing in common: they invite us to undergo the demything of America
We live and die by narrative. Our lives are constructed largely not by what happens to us, but by the stories we tell about what happens to us. This is why language matters, why words matter, and why there’s never “only rhetoric.” Whoever tells the narrative — by what means and in what form — shapes reality. In America, reality itself is constantly unstable. It seems to quiver, spasm, crack, fizzle, contract, expand, threatening to explode; reality feels combustible. Reality is made up largely of our words, and we have no collective language, no consensus on what words mean.
Like the ancient story of the Tower of Babel, we watch as our massive human ego project shakes and sways, built on a myth of unlimited expansion, unrestrained ambition, manifest destiny, and individualism. Constructing a reality that denies our frailties and vulnerabilities on a myth of independence instead of dependence, building as if we were not created, as if we are not contingent — we overreach, over, and over. Speech between people and between peoples signifies nothing, clarifies nothing. Words are trivialized, relativized, weaponized, and then finally just reduced to meaningless, unintelligible gibberish—to babble.
A few weeks ago, I was getting ready to spend the rest of the evening on an online book study I am doing with Drew Hart, PhD, and my mate Jarrod McKenna on Drew’s crucial text, Trouble I’ve Seen, when my phone, like reality itself, started to rumble and would not stop rumbling. I scrambled to read the messages and find out what was wrong. Suddenly, I was bombarded with images of peaceful protestors assaulted by tear gas, bodies thrown around, yet another scene of terror in this chapter of the American nightmare—and then the pantomimed piety of the man standing in front of the boarded-up church. He was making an alien attempt at holding a Bible. His movements were so stilted you’d imagine this was a person mimicking the way humans might hold an object for the very first time. His attempts at playing cowboy are always more Mel Brooks than Clint Eastwood, but the words he spoke were not comic, but ominous. He stood there holding the word…
