I’d guess it was at least fifty years ago when riding the escalator at Macy’s in White Plains, New York I spotted on my way to a lower floor, a small boy standing unaccompanied next to the cosmetics counter. My gaze seemed to capture him right at the moment he realized he was all by himself and utterly alone. In a fraction of a second the boy surveyed his surroundings as his face crumpled into an agonized expression of sheer panic and desperation. A river of tears and an ear-piercing wail for Mommy. As if the child were invisible a few people passed while a few others pushed out their lower lip in expressions of sympathy. I approached the boy, asking if he was lost which did nothing more than antagonize him, amplifying his screams for “MOMMY!” (Jeez, kid. I was just trying to help a voice in my head complained.) In moments Mommy reappeared, assuring him she had not abandoned him and that all was well with the world. He sniffed and snuffled as she took him by the hand and off they strolled. And that was that.
How this not so memorable fifty-year-old vignette found its way into my consciousness is difficult to say. I suppose simply thinking about the term lost sets in motion a rapid-fire scan of my personal memories where I seek analogues or metaphors that help open up my thinking. I appreciate this is not the way most people gain understanding, but now, I no longer apologize for not being much of an analytical thinker, a syllogistic reasoner, or a deductive investigator. As I pondered the very brief memory of that lost boy, I gleaned from it mostly a set of feelings associated with being lost; feelings like panic, fear, abandonment, vulnerability and suspicious of sympathetic offers of assistance. So, let the expression, “lost and found” turn your thoughts not to the place you might go to retrieve a lost glove, but to the words of John Newton’s hymn about being lost and later found.
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see
“Amazing Grace” was written in 1772 by Newton, described as a wretched man who worked as sailor and slave trader. Despised even by other slave traders as a profane human being, he underwent a conversion that dramatically changed his life’s path leading to his ordination as an Anglican clergyman. I urge you to read the story that inspired a song we hear so often. For now, I simply want to invite my reader to think about “lost and found” in the broadest possible fashion to gain greater insight into a kind of moral quicksand within which we are slowly sinking.
While stubborn men who will not ask for directions may be best known for refusing to believe they are lost, most who are lost simply push on forward in the dark without a clue as to where they are headed. The quick scan that small boy did by the cosmetic counter that told him he was lost and alone is not much different than what we do as adults. The key difference has to do with the conclusions we reach. That boy knew he was lost while we just drive on unaware like a car full of Simpson characters. The notion of being lost is so distasteful to us we have developed a whole range of mechanisms to defend us from believing we could possibly be lost. The older we get, the better we get at defending ourselves that we are headed in exactly the right direction. Dante’s, The Divine Comedy illustrates how naively we just push on. For Dante, it was midlife when he comes to the realization that he had somehow lost his way and simply no longer knew where he was (in life).
In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself, in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost. It is a hard thing to speak of, how wild, harsh and impenetrable that wood was, so that thinking of it recreates the fear. It is scarcely less bitter than death: but, in order to tell of the good that I found there, I must tell of the other things I saw there.
I cannot rightly say how I entered it. I was so full of sleep, at that point where I abandoned the true way.
While I believe most of us know this intuitively, I do want to underscore the realization that being lost is rarely immediately recognizable. Furthermore, the matter of getting lost is certainly more than a discrete event. Rather, it is an elaborate and insidious process that leverages all our talents for denial, and our capacity to be seduced by subtle and incremental reinforcement to follow a direction at odds with what we have believed is “the true way”. Becoming lost is the gradually learned capacity to cope with an increasingly unfamiliar and discordant milieu until little to nothing is recognizable any longer.
Just as becoming lost can be a lengthy process, awareness that one is lost is unlikely to be a discrete event. Rather, awareness grows as decisions create an increasingly dissonant and unfamiliar world. Life becomes more uncomfortable as it becomes less and less familiar. Ultimately, one cannot help but confess they no longer know where they are; when as Dante says we become aware that we have “abandoned the true way”.
It is hard to believe that many of us have not been jarred by an awareness that the generally accepted norms of our society and culture have been disrupted in an increasingly disturbing way. For many it seems the disruption is welcomed and they have gladly aligned with it. For others, the disruption has raised concerns that large segments of our country have become lost, gradually seduced over the last decade to embrace an unfamiliar world at odds with our shared history.
I was stunned to read in this morning’s Washington Post (October 7, 2024) that a member of Donald Trump’s family along with his allies threatened the prestigious consulting firm, Deloitte after a Deloitte employee’s post on X regarding JD Vance became public. The threat suggested that a Trump administration might terminate the $3 Billion contracts held by Deloitte for a single employee’s negative statement about JD Vance. The question I posed to myself was how this happened. How has our former and potentially future leadership come to embrace a gang-like demanding fealty or silence with any statement or action they disagree with. Why would the employer of the employee who disagreed with JD Vance be punished for an opinion expressed by their employee? This kind of behavior is not new to our dramatically changing political system. But for me it helped crystalize how very lost we have become, most explicitly over the course of the past ten years.
Still, my effort here is not to complain that the MAGA movement has lost its way. Rather, it is to point to the size and scale that the matter of lost and found is applicable to. The gradual evolution of a single person’s life to be at odds with what more or less has been established as the country’s “true way” is quite different to a collection of millions of people abandoning what was largely accepted as the country’s true way Within this context, it is important to note that this so-called “true way” is not about some specific set of dogmas. It is mostly a matter of what people describe as general decency or not intending to sound too nostalgic “the golden rule”. Even as I write this, I recognize it sounds naïve. There are criminals, perverts, fraudsters, hustlers and the like everywhere, but they have not dominated our society and established new rules by which we live.
However, identifiable changes in the last decade that have polarized much of American society minimally suggest that one side or the other has gotten lost. Mitch McConnel’s creation of a new rule to keep President Obama from nominating a replacement for Scalia one year before the national election was a wild swing away from the norms of fair play. This came into clearer focus when the tables were turned later but McConnel was still Senate Leader. He approved the nomination process to favor his party despite the fact that the conditions mirrored those he disallowed just a few years earlier. What happened to McConnel? Was there now a new, albeit unfamiliar “true way”. Did winning become more important in this new world view? Ends and means, huh? I am old, I know. But it feels unfamiliar if for no other reason than that it was done so publicly and shamelessly. Trump’s litany of lies have forced many to question his cognitive capabilities, but I fear this is just another manifestation of ends justifying means. Do whatever it takes to win even if it means acting crazy, cheating, lying, using people. If it gets you what you want…it must be right!
I learned yesterday from a man I know who owns properties in Ashville, NC that some 14 dead were discovered in clean up operations a few days ago. These were people who mostly were living off the grid, he explained. Yet even as people suffer (across ideological lines), MAGA leadership encourages their followers not to believe those who are there to help. Why? It’s hard to assimilate these strange new realities into the world view I am familiar with.
Finally, the experience of ‘being found’ or finding some sort of path to a recognizable place is far from a given. While the terms ‘lost and found’ fit comfortably together, countless biographies and history itself reminds us that the journey from one to the other is fraught and there is nothing neat or comfortable about the long trek ahead. It won’t just work itself out. Choices must be made, institutions and people challenged, setbacks endured, and patience and persistence embraced.
It is a very strange place in which we find ourselves. There is little that is recognizable for those who failed to assimilate the slow but steady loss of liberty and the decency we extend to those with whom we share this world. It is not a stretch to suggest that we are lost. Very lost. We have a vibrantly documented history that powerfully illustrates where this path leads. But in this unfamiliar place… this newly emerging world, it seems history is of little import unless revised to suit an unfamiliar world I fear will devour us.
Something to Say 