Living a Mostly Ordinary Life

PREFACE Is there no such thing as normal anymore? Have we lost all touch with reality and rational thinking? I started this book in December of 2023, mostly out of frustration with what had been happening around me, putting my thoughts down to try and make some sense out of them. The world has been turned upside down by a culture that doesn’t seem to know the meaning of normal or ordinary anymore. Aren’t there enough problems in life without trying to change the creative and ontological order. Is the entire population of this country buying into this nonsense? Apparently not. I think the 2024 election has shown me that there are some ordinary people out there that want to return to normalcy. They want to get back to reality and those mostly ordinary things that make up most of life. People know what life is about and they are tired of having someone else tell them who they are, what is important, and what they must believe. I have often called myself a conservative, in just about every area. I think most of my students and other people that hear that, don’t really know what it means. To them it just means he calls himself a Christian or that he is a Republican, or most likely both. For me conservative means that I want to conserve the good things of the past, the things that have brought me the most satisfaction and the greatest happiness. I want to preserve them for the next generation. Albert Mohler calls it a disposition toward old things. I am talking about those things that have proven to be good for individual happiness and human flourishing, much of what I would call ordinary things. As Wilfred M. McClay says in his book Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American, history is interested in the extraordinary and forgets about the ordinary things of life. Those ordinary things that are worth fighting for. “History leaves out many of the most important aspects of life. It generally does not deal with the vast stretches of time during which life goes on normally, during which people fall in love, have families, raise their children, bury their dead, and carry on with the small acts of heroism, sacrifice, and devotion that marks so much of everyday life.” I love good stories, and many of my values and beliefs shared in this book will be in story form. Story telling has been a large part of my life and career, to my student’s joy or disgust. If I can put things in story form, I can usually remember them, like remembering parts of a movie, a novel, events in my life, or stories in the Bible. “We are at our core, remembering and story-making creatures, and stories are one of the chief ways we find meaning in the flow of events.” I also have a knack for recalling movie scenes and quotes, particularly old ones. I share them mainly because they portray some of the ordinary things that at one time were presented in the movies, and because they helped shape the culture at that time, like movies do now. They are the things I want to conserve for future generations, especially the following generations of my own family and to the following generations of ordinary people that will make a difference right where they live. I want to encourage the next generation of ordinary people that “don’t always win at the ballot box, but in most regions of the country, they always present a massive hurdle to the leftist power grabs.” These are the people that will get up, regain their focus on daily life, and go back to work. They will do what they need to do to encourage others around them, provide for their families, help their communities, and even help those that continue to vilify them. These are the true “acts of heroism, sacrifice, and devotion that marks so much of everyday life.” It reminds me of a line from the Andy Hardy movie, You’re Only Young Once. “You can’t beat a code of conventions that’s been hammered out for hundreds of years.” In the process of reading this book you may be forced to endure some of my stories; stories about childhood, school, single life, falling in love, marriage, fatherhood, work, and grandparenting. I hope that you will find them entertaining, easy to read, and in some ways useful. I want to be as open as possible about the things I know and believe, but not transparent. Someone once said to me, always tell the truth, but don’t always be telling it. I hope this book will help my children and grandchildren understand my own character, just like I have tried to understand the character of my own parents. And maybe it will make you curious enough to check out some of the sources I’ve referenced. I think they are good ones. In any case, I will do my best to tell a good story about the things that I know, believe, and cherish, those things that are worth fighting for.