Not My Polling Place
It’s about seven on a Thursday morning, and I’m on my way to work. It’s sunny and crisp, a little under 70 degrees, which is California’s way of saying fall is starting to move in.
A couple of things have been drifting through my head. We just had an election, and with it a shift in political power. And I took a trip back to a city I used to live in, somewhere around forty years ago. Maybe thirty. Now that I’m thinking about it, I’m honestly not sure. Maybe forty. It doesn’t really matter. Well, it does. It puts things in perspective.
Forty years is a long time for a city, and this one had grown into something huge. Back in the day, I went to a church there, and since I happened to be in the area, I swung by to see it.
My God, had it changed. The church itself, the actual building I remembered, was gone. Completely removed. The hall and the school were still standing, upgraded, so it wasn’t until I got up close that anything looked semi-recognizable. That’s when the memories started coming back.
I ended up talking with one of the pastors there. Younger guy, probably not much older than forty. He seemed almost disinterested, in the history and in why I was even standing there. I found that a little ironic. Here I was talking to someone who, in some sense, holds a position of authority in that place, and my past didn’t seem to matter to him at all. Then again, why would it? It doesn’t affect him.
At first I started to feel offended. That was my past, a part of me, and for a moment it felt like I wasn’t welcome in my own home. But it was a knee-jerk reaction, and almost as soon as I felt it, I caught myself. Wait a second. Why? It’s not mine anymore. It was his now. It belonged to the families and the kids running across a campus I used to think of as mine.
I was there from about eighteen to twenty-one, give or take. 1989, to put a date on it. What strikes me now is that something that was such a huge part of my life is something I hadn’t really thought about in years. It came up in stories, sure. Oh, I went to this church. Oh, I was in this youth group. Oh, you won’t believe what happened. But it wasn’t really part of my vernacular, for lack of a better word.
Funny how fast I made it that way again. The minute I walked onto that campus, it was mine, and all I could think was, what did you do to my house?
Same Address, New Owners
And honestly? It was beautiful. It was like someone took a pretty nice Toyota and turned it into a Lamborghini. Or a Range Rover. I don’t know what the right comparison is here, but hopefully you get the point. It’s a cathedral now. I mean, not really. But it looked regal. When I was there, it was a nice little community church. Afterward I did some digging with AI, and apparently it went from serving about 400 families to something like 2,400, or some ridiculous number. That’s a huge church.
It got me thinking about how possessive we can get about our past, even the parts we haven’t brought up in years, good or bad.
And I kept wondering why this pastor couldn’t give two shits about my history. One of the priests from my time there had basically built the parish up. He took it over to make it financially stable, and now the hall is named after him. Standing inside it brought back a flood of memories. I remember thinking, well, that’s funny.
Mind you, I was there about ten years after the parish was founded. Back then it sat on the north edge of town, the outskirts. Now it’s practically the middle of the city. That’s how much it’s grown. And for the reader’s sake, I can say where it was: Phoenix, Arizona.
Champions of Nothing
That same weekend, politics were everywhere. I’ve become sort of apolitical. I vote pretty simply: almost no on everything, because I’m cynical like that. I don’t want new taxes. I don’t want anything that controls my current rights. I don’t want bonds. I don’t want to pay extra. It’s that simple. And I stay away from judges and anything else I don’t know about. I just don’t vote on them.
To me, that’s one of the problems. Uninformed voters vote on things they don’t understand, and those choices land on the people who actually did their homework.
Somewhere in all that, I realized it really doesn’t matter. It’s not mine anymore. I think, for a while, I was addicted to politics.
Right after the trip, I was talking with a young person, and the same thing happened in a different way. They were talking about their politics and what was going to happen now, and I told them it doesn’t change. It’s all been done before. It was a bit of a Marcus Aurelius moment, me playing the teacher. Whatever side they were on, what did it matter? What changed for them with this big shift in power? They couldn’t really put a finger on it, other than feeling like they’d won something.
So I said, that’s great. But what’d you win?
I’m not sure why I felt the need to teach that lesson. Maybe because I feel a little more enlightened with that mindset, and I want to share it.
Pot, Meet Kettle
But walking away from that conversation, I caught myself thinking, well, it doesn’t matter, I don’t really care. And that’s when it hit me. I had become the pastor of that church.
I didn’t care about that young person’s present any more than the pastor cared about my past.
Let that sink in.
Then the bigger question crept in: why does any of it matter? Now I’m starting to sound depressing. But we really only care about what we care about, and once we stop caring, it stops being important. Except it’s still important to somebody.
My story was important to me. I wanted to feel like I still belonged somewhere that had changed so much, to re-hook a few roots. And the pastor made zero attempt to accept that he was, in some sense, in receivership of my history.
It’s not like there was any doubt I’d been there. I showed him. He pointed things out, there’s where the school was, there’s where this was, and I’m standing there going, oh my God, that is the school. The old skeleton of it. Some things had changed, but it was the same place.
Results May Vary. Well, Not Really.
I was wrapped up in politics for a long time, and I’ve come to realize it really doesn’t matter to me on a national level. I’m sure somebody will want to argue that, and if you’re reading this and itching to argue the politics, I’m sure you’ve got valid points. But I’m not talking politics here. I’m talking about something else. And if you do want to argue it, you’re kind of the person I’m talking about.
Today is day two after this power surge, and nothing’s changed. We’ll see in three months, six months. I’ve watched power swing between presidents, one to the left, one to the right, and not much changed for me, except that in California I pay more for gas. That one I feel. But people voted for it. They raised the gas tax.
Twenty-Five Cents to Save the Planet
I pay for a paper bag at the grocery store now, because plastic is the enemy. Meanwhile, about ninety percent of what goes into that bag is wrapped in plastic. The bread’s in plastic. So I’m paying twenty-five cents to put a plastic bag inside a paper bag, something I was told would never happen back when they started charging me for the plastic ones.
There’s a real point in there. We were promised locally that something would never happen, and of course it did, because of uninformed voters. Oh, it’s for the environment. Oh, it’s only a penny. A penny here, a little something there, and pretty soon you’ve got a whole thing. Somebody could say the same about national politics.
The biggest thing that’s ever hit me financially, and where I really feel my rights were taken away, was being told I had to have healthcare. I didn’t have a choice. At one point the federal government said we had to prove we had coverage, and if we didn’t, we paid a penalty. Then Trump reversed the penalty, and the Democrats in California said, oh no, we’re keeping it, we’ll just make it a state thing. So I still have to prove it. And this isn’t an argument about whether you need healthcare, or whether it’s good to have. It’s about being mandated to provide proof of it. Federal or California, it’s still a penalty, and it’s still the government telling me I have to have insurance, and if I don’t, I have to buy it. I shouldn’t be required to purchase anything via the government. Call it communistic or socialistic, or maybe I’ve got the political label wrong, but either way it’s forcing me to buy something I may not want. It’s my choice, right?
Apparently not. Left or right, I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t.
And that’s my thing. I think ninety percent of what happens from one administration to the next doesn’t really matter. Call me a conspiracist, but I think it’s all relative. I think there are games being played at levels we don’t even know about.
But I digress. Let me get back on track.
No Forwarding Address
Where I’m going with all this is pretty simple. Somebody else’s politics didn’t matter to me, even though they mattered to them. And something that mattered to me didn’t necessarily matter to somebody else. Recognizing that is a lesson worth learning. My self-importance, my history, isn’t the world’s.
I was offended by the pastor because it felt like I wasn’t welcome in my own home. Then I realized it wasn’t my own home. And that’s a lot like politics. People dismiss your views when they don’t line up with their own. There’s no real conversation. There was no welcome. It was basically, yep, this is the church, this is what happened. Forty years later, my history didn’t seem to matter to him, and honestly, why would it? It’s been an institution there for a long time. For all I know, he grew up with it always just being there. I don’t know his history either. I made assumptions about what he was thinking. I even assumed he didn’t give a shit. I assumed what I didn’t know. I used my own insecurities, and old feelings I’d lost touch with, as fodder, and dressed them up as what he must have been feeling. Maybe he was just unsure of why I was there. Nobody told me I wasn’t welcome. I felt like I didn’t belong, and I kind of placed that on him, the same way I was dumbing down something that mattered to that young person.
They say you can’t go home again. I think there’s some truth in that. Home is always home, but it’ll never be the home you grew up in.
It’ll never be exactly what you left.
