Rock Island, IL

Alexander Pope, who was right more often than the rest of us put together, said that “truth will buoy up at last.”

That’s all well and good and accurate enough, I suppose, but the problem is that fools will also rise to the surface—as inevitably and precipitantly as farts in the bathwater.

And man, who has ever employed his reason only to increase his vice, has been tireless in inventing ways to test the buoyancy of dunces: bureaucracies, schools, Facebook, NASCAR, English departments, the priesthood or “ministry,” fast “food,” the comment box. All these and many more are but the gray water atop which floats a vast confederacy of fools, each armed mightily against sense, each in league with another, each engaged in dubious battle with all sweetness and light.

If you prick them, do they not pop?

But I don’t think there’s any use believing we don’t all of us have a lifetime membership in this confederacy. With but a few exceptions, whom less than a tithe of us will ever know, we are a dull and undiscerning gaggle of half-wits—on our best days. St. Paul (or “Paul,” as his intimate friends, the modern commentators, call him) said we “see through a glass darkly.” And maybe we do. But as my old buddy and former colleague John Cunningham used to say (he is the only person I know of who ever improved upon Holy Writ), “Through a glass? Doubtful. We see through a glass eyeball. Maybe. And very darkly at that.”

Darkling we see. Darkling we listen.

Again, Pope: “life can little more supply / Than just to look about us and to die.”

Save that there is space for goodness, which we all ought to be capable of, and which is particularly available to us in our particular places.

Such places are not called “the nation” or “the state” or “the region.”

Such places are called “here,” and each “here” is the place, regardless of our larger aims or ambitions, that each of us belongs to and has actual palpable influence in. Some of us may have influence in larger spheres, and that may or may not be good. Some of us may move mountains—with or without faith. But each of us has influence “here.” Each of us has the choice of being or not being a jack-ass at the Parks & Rec flag football game. Each of us has the choice of leaving the car keys at home and setting out on foot, of declining the feed-lot T-bone, of opposing the “annex” of this or that field for this or that retailer bent on improving the place by destroying it.

And yet every day I hear people ask, “what good does your walking (or knowing the cow you’re eating or promoting this or that) do?”

It does me some good, and what good it does me is my affair. But the real answer is, “who knows?” The localist impulse is an impulse founded upon faith in the operations of grace according to which the deeds of, say, an obscure carpenter’s son in Palestine several centuries ago, or the remark of an eighth-grade social studies teacher one Tuesday morning, affect the choice we’re confronted with here and now. It is an impulse founded upon the faith that the good available to us here and now is an absolute good. Which is why we do it.

Which is why we encourage others to do it, regardless of what the planners plan. Grace goes under cover or steps outside of history, as it were, for long stretches of time. Then, suddenly, it brings forth fruit in an unexpected “here.”

You can be the person who, never having put a fist into the dirt before, raises a tomato plant in a pot on a balcony in the city because you understand that changing the food economy has to start somewhere. Or you can munch on Cheetos and “surf” the “net” each night in search of localists in dire need of your particular brand of realism. Give me the city-dwelling tomato-grower. She, at least, is trying not to mix her metaphors or pollute her colon.

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