The Two Great American pastimes: Celebrating and Freaking Out.

As we face down the start of the celebrating and freaking out cycle again.

 Everyone knows that we are a divided nation. No one is disputing that ever. Yet there are still some big things we all have in common. Life in these semi-United States, on both sides of the aisle and in both of the primary colors, continues to mainly revolve around our two basic national pastimes:  1. Celebrating and  2. Freaking Out.   Sure, Washington might appear to be broken beyond repair but we, the people, are so busy celebrating and freaking out that we really don’t have time to pay any attention. And in this way do we keep ourselves busy busy busy! As soon as we have a few free minutes after finishing our obligation to one, the other rushes in to fill the void.

National Pastime #1: Celebrating.

It seems to be a universally human trait for every civilization to designate national days of celebration. The typical American calendar year offers a modest base-line total of eleven big holidays a year. This provides a family of four with about twenty different reasons for buying centerpieces and holding family gatherings (if you add an unspecified number of birthdays, graduations, anniversaries and sports team accomplishments.)

Although this may seem like a lot, we are nowhere near being able to compete with ancient Rome, a civilization that celebrated a spectacular 159 publically funded holidays a year! When you think about the fact that this only gave the Romans two days to untangle another set of decorations and organize the next holiday menu, it isn’t surprising they didn’t have the focus to keep their empire from crumbling.

I was thinking about all this because we are uncomfortably close to the official start of the biggest part of our national annual celebratory cycle: the three plus continuous months of Hallo-giving-mas. Fortunately we all feel feisty and ready to take it on because we had August off for R&R …(unless you are a member of Costco in which case you were treated to the first stirrings of the pre-lit Christmas trees right after the 4th of July.)

Most of us just sleep-walk thru Labor Day, a holiday which has long distinguished itself by offering no clues at all about how it would like to be celebrated. Would it like a barbecue? Wouldn’t it at least like a song and a string of lights? Even the people (or AI) that write ‘Wiki-How’ (whatever that is) seem clueless about what Labor Day wants from us. This year, their numbered list of celebration suggestions were as follows: #1 Attend a Labor Day parade or festival #2 Host a Labor Day party. #3 Go to someone else's picnic or party. #4 Enjoy a football game.#5 Go swimming for the day. #6 Take a day trip to a new place. #7 Check out Labor Day sales. #8. Don’t even bother to read any more of these: just make yourself a tasty sandwich and call it a Labor Day sandwich. Celebration completed! Kudos!

Anyway, by the time mid-September arrives, we are out of available options for trying to ignore the rumbling of the holiday train as it is pulling in to the station. Whether you want to play along or not makes no difference at all once those seasonal songs begin playing on the sound systems in stores. Sure, we may not have as many designated celebratory dates as the ancient Romans, but as a cultural entity we have been doing our best to pick up the slack by expanding each holiday already on the books into a many months long extravaganza.

In my lifetime, Halloween, the only holiday that consciously tries to combine celebrating AND freaking out in to one unstoppable package, has expanded to fill the entire month of October. In fact this year, in my neighborhood, weird Halloween yard tableaus featuring dead bodies have already begun showing up. (At least I think these gorey presentations have something to do with Halloween. It is always a possibility, in the current cultural climate, that these are just the yards of people who are proud of being mass shooters, second amendment obsessives or Jan.6 supporters who want to show off their plans for a new civil war.)

We all gave up on trying to keep Christmas from being a multi-month affair decades ago. But recently Thanksgiving began to grow some new tendrils that reach into the ‘pumpkin spice season’ and synch up to daylight savings. Which is why I would like to take this opportunity to suggest (as I do every year) that we give the same expansive treatment to Valentines Day. As it now exists, it is a holiday that is still confined to a burst of last minute spending that is bathed in resentment and disguised as romantic fervor. “Here. Have some candy.” men everywhere say to women who spent the rest of the year trying not to eat carbs or sugar. But hear me out: Valentine’s Day is a missed opportunity to unite the community behind the most interesting combination of celebrating and freaking out conceivable. All that is needed is a mandate that every household decorate their yard and/or roof with a 3 dimensional diorama showing, as honestly as possible, the joys or nightmares that cupid has bestowed upon their household. Think of the excitment of putting the family in the car and then driving around and getting to observe what has been going on in the other homes, love-wise. “Wow. Those two are still together?” you will say, as you drive past the house on the corner. And “Look at the decorations on this house.Can you believe they both just got remarried for the third time!” It would be a way to really get to know your neighbors and see them at their most interesting! Please, someone: Let’s get this going.

Moving on to:

National Past Time #2: Freaking Out.

As a culture, we love the idea of filling all of the time available between holidays by hurling ourselves headlong into terrifying and infuriating portents of fear and outrage. We are like hypochondriacs reading the Merck’s Diagnostic Manual, looking for symptoms that will scare us into paralysis. Why are we like this? Did we all become adrenaline junkies from watching too many horror movies as kids? Doesn’t life provide us with enough really scary stuff on a day to day basis that we don’t need to invent new crazy stuff? The answers are yes, it does. And apparently not.

My husband likes the freaking out part so much that he often lies in bed at night perusing mug shots of terrifyingly insane people. “Want to see a photo of the guy who boiled and ate his uncle?” he will ask, holding up his Ipad to show me a photo of a wild eyed guy with many many facial tattoos. “No, thanks.” I usually respond, afraid to open my eyes and therefore causing him great disappointment.

Like holidays, terrifying predictions of bad times to come provide us with many things that we value. They help us cast a warm glow on the mundane routines that we would otherwise take for granted. They heighten the positive aspects of the dull moments of our existence. They remind us that even the intolerable behaviors of our problematic families are a thing for which we should have gratitude. Of all of the above, that might be the most challenging.

But living in terror that we are approaching the end of the world goes back to the beginning of recorded history. Archeologists found an Assyrian clay tablet from around 2800 B.C. which bears the inscription: “There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; the end of the world is evidently approaching.”

There have been more specific predictions along these lines than there are numbers. A brief perusal of a timeline of predictions of the end of the world in Wikipedia shows that there was at least one per year for almost every recorded century of human history. Because you probably think I am exaggerating, I will now list the dates the end of the world was predicted for ONLY the 20th century: 1901,1910,1911,1914,1915,1918,1920,1925,1926,1924,1935,1936,1941,1943,1947,1954,1959,1960,1962,1967,1969,1972,1974,1975,1976,1977,1979,1980,1981,1982,1986,1987,1988,1989,1990,1991,1992,1993,1994,1995,1997,1998,1999. There were multiples for 2000, as there always are at a century change.

The earliest specifically designated freak out dates that I remember taking seriously were during my college years at UC Berkeley where, on MANY occasions, I was solemnly informed by people who were said to be in the know that the planets were lined up in a way that has not occurred since Pompeii was destroyed. These predictions were so integrated into life in the Bay Area during the decade I lived there that if someone didn’t give an exact date for a big catastrophic earthquake in San Francisco at least twice a year, the residents of the city would begin to get cranky.

By the time I entered my so called adulthood, there were so many regularly predicted and very specific reasons for freaking out that most of them still have their own Wikipedia pages. 1973 had the ominous comet Kahoutek, thought to be a portent of a colossal doomsday event. It was followed closely by the coming ruination of civilization by the falling pieces of Sky Lab.

As time went on, I was beside myself about the hole in the Ozone layer, Watergate, and quite a few versions of El Nino and La Nina. Other terrifying touch stones I can remember without having to try too hard are Barry Goldwater, The John Birch Society, The Symbionese Liberation Army, Swine Flu, SARS, Avian flu, Mad Cow disease, Epstein-Barr syndrome, Ronald Reagan’s dementia, Dan Quayle, Morton Downey Junior, The Satanic Panic, the Red and Orange alerts, shoe bombers, killer bees, Dick Cheney running the white house, George Bush’s limited IQ, Bill Clinton’s sex-capades, Pizza-gate, the end of the Mayan calendar and a coming geo-thermal eruption of Yellowstone that will bring about a new ice age.

I am still waiting for someone to apologize to me for Y2K. If you were too young to have registered the impact this one had, it involved a supposed difficulty that computers were going to have changing the year from 1999 to 2000 that was going to keep so many computerized systems from functioning properly that planes would fall out of the sky and all the utilities and water purification systems would shut down and go off the grid. There were warnings of possible “nuclear war,” caused by glitches in early-warning systems; the International Monetary Fund predicted economic chaos in developing nations; Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan worried that panic would prompt U.S. businesses to stockpile goods, leading to widespread shortages, and CNN reported that the U.S. milk supply would dry up because dairy farm equipment might malfunction. And after all that tension and hysteria, which I guess we all enjoyed, no one ever stepped forward to offer a little “Oops. Sorry. My bad.” when NOTHING ever happened.

Since the internet became everything, we as a population of humans have exponentially expanded our commitment to freaking out by adding baseless conspiracies that, before social media, could never have gained so much traction. The GOP, never a bastion of sanity, likes the media attention that freaking out offers them so much that creating and spreading new unsubstantiated reasons for panic and terror has become the entirety of their brand.

But I feel I should add that both political parties enjoy freaking out whenever possible. Whoever is not in power gets to take the lead. I can remember feeling frozen with terror about concentration camps that I heard that Dick Cheney was creating.

Now, of course, among our best reasons for freaking out are the spectre of AI and the goopy messes deposited everywhere by Q-anon. I have no idea where this stuff is leading. But it definitely seems to be the case that the scariest predictions I’ve lived thru ended up altogether different from what was being predicted, when/if they ever materialized in the real world.

And now, just in case we didn’t have enough scary reality based stuff on our plates like pandemics and climate change , we the people seem to have decided to extend the once-every-four-years-nerve wracking-tension-fest that is the Presidential Election to a continuous 12 months-a-year affair that re-starts, with all new polling results, the second after the previous election cycle ends. To top it off, we have decided to appoint, as a permanent contender for the job of president, the scariest and least qualified candidate to ever accrue a huge following while simultaneously being tried for felonies, threatening to seek revenge and promising to undo the basic tenets of democracy. That is a long way of saying that the continually morphing nightmare of idiocy that falls into the category of all-things-Trump is the greatest boon to our love of freaking out that has been created to date. Every time anything starts to seem kind of calm or under control, he can be counted on to kick off the cycle again.

Which is why I have decided that we need to make room for a new set of National holidays that we will call Nostradamus days. Because after years of paying too much attention to the cues requiring me to freak out, I can honestly say that the safest days of any given year have always been the ones on which Nostradamus bestowed a prediction of disaster. That is why I am proposing that we designate them as national days of relaxation. Hopefully Wiki-How will rise to the occasion and compile a list of suggestions on how they should be celebrated. “Attend a Nostradamus picnic or parade. Have a Nostradamus day dinner.“ “Sit down and read a long list of his predictions that never happened.”

But first, for the sake of entertainment, let’s re-organize Valentine’s Day. Come on! Don’t we deserve at least one holiday that is fun?