False Security

It’s amazing which lessons we learn from our parents and which ones we don’t, isn’t it? Considering that I quit making my bed every day the minute I moved out, my mother would be amazed to realize how many lessons I do remember. One of my favorites is from a time when I think I was about 7 years old... My dad had finally gotten his doctorate and was an assistant professor at Harper College in Binghamton, NY, and my mother finally got the chance to be a stay-at-home Mom. She LOVED it. Anyway, she had decided to buy a new vacuum cleaner. She knew exactly what she wanted, an Electrolux, and so when the door-to-door salesman showed up she was already prepared to say yes. Mom let him go through his paces, though - never pass up a chance to let someone else clean your living room - and she listened carefully to his sales pitch, because you can always learn something. Mistaking her caution for resistance, the salesman started pushing just a little too hard. He had already found out where my Dad worked, and he told my mother that the wife of the college president and of several of the big-name professors had already bought one, and she surely would want one, too.

Well, my mother had him out of there so fast he probably left skid marks. And the next day she went down to the Electrolux offices and told them what had happened, and that she would NEVER, EVER, buy something because someone else had one. She went on to say that the only reason she was going ahead with her decision to buy the vacuum cleaner was because she would also NEVER, EVER NOT buy something because someone else had one. But she made them promise not to give the credit to their salesman.

Ever since then I’ve had my antennae up when the argument “everyone else is doing it” comes up... if everyone else is doing it, my first instinct is NOT to do it. I rarely read best-sellers except for Tom Clancy and I didn’t watch the last episode of Seinfeld. But some things that “everyone does” I do need to know about... It’s just as stupid to reject something because everyone else is doing it as it is to embrace it. So I’m forced to think for myself, which is not all that bad a habit to get into.

Have you ever noticed how often politicians start an argument in favor of some program or other by saying, “every other industrialized nation in the world has, or does ... ” whatever the pet project is? My hackles go up immediately. If that’s the best argument they can come up with, I’m not interested. And even if they’ve got other arguments that are better, I still resent being manipulated by an appeal to the herd instinct.

Maybe what I’ve got is BETTER.

Sometimes the green grass in the neighbor’s yard is Astroturf.

Look at the trouble that mentality got Israel into, back in Samuel’s time.

"Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah, and said to him, 'You are old and your sons do not follow in your ways; appoint for us, then, a king to govern us, like other nations.'" [1 Sam 8:1-5]

Why did they want a king in the first place? What did they think it would do for them? Well, the reason they come up with is that Samuel is getting old, and that his sons Joel and Abijah weren’t following in their father’s footsteps. They “took bribes and perverted justice.” And the only solution the elders of Israel could think of was to follow the lead of the people around them, the same people they had been fighting with for the last three or four hundred years.

Think of this as one of those puzzles in the Sunday papers: how many things can you find wrong with this picture?

First, the people of Israel had been ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN to take their cues from the nations around them. “When the LORD your God has cut off before you the nations whom you are about to enter to dispossess them, when you have dispossessed them and live in their land, take care that you are not snared into imitating them...” [Dt 12:29-30] To follow after the other nations’ political practices was EXACTLY THE SAME as following after their gods; there was no separation of church and state.

Second, the judgeship that Samuel held wasn’t hereditary. The priesthood was, but judges weren’t. From the time of Moses, disputes were handled by the elders of the tribes. Remember when Moses’ father-in-law Jethro helped him set up the system because Moses was working himself to death?