66 Years Ago on Route 66

Route 66 is one of the iconic national highways in the U.S. On May 26, 1957, 66 years ago today, June and I drove up that highway as newlyweds. We were on our wedding trip to Chicago—and driving up Route 66 was the best way to get there. 

Route 66 was established in 1926, and it was the major U.S. highway from Chicago to Los Angeles, traversing about 2,450 miles.

In Chapter 12 of the powerful novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), author John Steinbeck writes:

HIGHWAY 66 IS THE main migrant road. 66—the long concrete path across the country ….

66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership …. 66 is the mother road, the road of flight.

But even by the 1940s, Route 66 was viewed in a much happier mood by many people: Nat King Cole recorded the hit song, “Get Your Kicks on Route 66” in 1946 (hear it here).

It amazes me now to realize that June and I were driving up Route 66 for our honeymoon “kicks” only 31 years after it was established as a national highway.

“57 Years for a ’57 Marriage” was the title of the blog post I made on May 25, 2014. I made some reference there to our marriage, but it was more about the year 1957 in general. (You are invited to (re)read that post, and see our wedding picture, here.)

June and I met in September 1955, not long after we matriculated as first-year students at Southwest Baptist College in Bolivar, Missouri (30+ miles north of Springfield.)

It wasn’t very long before we started talking about getting married at some point. A few months before graduating from the small junior college, we decided that point was soon after our graduation in 1957.

So on May 26, a Sunday afternoon, we were married in Rondo Baptist Church, June’s home church about 15 miles north of Bolivar. Following the reception in the decorated basement of the church, we left at about 4:30 and drove east for a little over an hour to Lebanon, where we got on Route 66.

It was not much more than an hour’s drive to Rolla, but it had been a big day already, so we decided to stop for the night at Schuman’s Motor Inn. (I was amazed to find that there is a “Shuman's Motor Inn US Route 66 Rolla Missouri 1957” postcard for sale on eBay.).

The cost for the room in Rolla was $7—which seems very cheap now, but that was all I made in seven hours working for minimum wage at a shoe factory later that summer. At the current minimum wage in Missouri that would be equivalent to just over $72.

The next night we stayed in the southern suburbs of Chicago—and it cost $9 there. And then we spent a couple of nights in the elegant Palmer House in downtown Chicago. The construction of that 25-story hotel was completed in 1925. It was an impressive place for us, two Missouri farm kids, to stay!

So, what can I say after 66 years of marriage? Would I do it again, get married that young? We struggled financially for our first nine years, during which time the two of us, combined, were full-time students for eleven years—and we also had two children by November 1960.

But, yes, I would do it again, no question about it. In spite of the challenges of those first years—and different challenges in the following decades—I have never for a moment regretted marrying my beautiful 19-year-old bride 66 years ago, when I was still 18.

For several years now, we have talked about hoping we will be able to celebrate our 75^th wedding anniversary. My parents were married 88 years ago this month, and they celebrated their 72^nd anniversary about 2½ months before my father died at age 92 in July 2007.

But we are still hoping that on May 26, 2032, we will, indeed, be able to celebrate 75 years of married life. We may not make it—but if not, we will die trying. 

Having Hope, Feeling Hopeless, Being Hope Free

As you see from the title, this blog article is about hope, but please note that it is only about hope in the here and now. Hope for or in the “afterlife” is certainly of great importance, but this post is only about the hope we have, or don’t have, in this world at this time. 

Hope is a widely used word and an appealing concept. I have long been an ardent advocate of hope, in spite of not always being optimistic.*

Often, though, hope is just a word expressing what we desire: we “hope” it won’t rain on our picnic planned for the weekend or we “hope” our team wins the game we have tickets for. But such hope is nothing more than wishful thinking and has negligible impact on what we will do or not do.

In a more robust sense, hope means to work for and to wait for something with the confident expectation and anticipation that it will at some point, sooner or later, be fulfilled. In that sense, hope is grounded in a positive view of the future that we believe is conceivable.

Challenging circumstances sometimes siphon off hope, but then through determination one can cultivate new hope. In fact, “New Hope” is the name of two churches that are very meaningful to me.**

In numerous ways and at numerous times, having hope is a good and positive mindset, one to be affirmed and promoted.

When we no longer have hope, we feel hopeless, and that is usually an uncomfortable state of affairs.  

In his book Die Wise (2015), Stephen Jenkinson writes, “Hope is very often a refusal to know what is so, and steadfastly it is a refusal to live as if the present moment is good enough and all we really have. Hopeless is the collapse of that refusal, and it looks a lot like depression.”

So, feeling hopeless is often a negative state of mind and one we want to avoid as much as possible. But, realistically, sometimes it is necessary to give up hope and to deal with what is rather than what we would like to be otherwise.

For example, when a terminally ill person’s loved ones give up hope, they put that loved one on hospice, seeking to make them as comfortable as possible for the remainder of their days, no longer hoping that they will miraculously regain their health.

Some who see the current ecological crisis most clearly think the struggle to save the environment is hopeless. Thus, Guy McPherson avers, “The living planet is in the fourth and final stage of a terminal disease. . . . it is long past time we admitted hospice is the only reasonable way forward.”***.

There is a close relationship, then, between hopelessness and being hope free.

Why can being hope free be considered a good thing? Well, hope can be, and perhaps often is, a refusal to accept reality. In that way, it is ill-founded and detrimental. To be hopeful in spite of clearly having a terminal illness is not helpful.

In January of last year, I made a blog post about the “serenity prayer” attributed to theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. That prayer begins, “GOD, grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can; and the Wisdom to know the difference.”

Perhaps some of us have mostly emphasized the second part: the prayer for courage to change things. But maybe the first part is more important: the prayer for the serenity to accept things that cannot be changed, thus, to be hope free.

That doesn’t mean being constantly depressed as when we feel hopeless. Rather, as is expressed in the longer version of the prayer, it means “Living one day at a time; enjoying one moment at a time; accepting hardship as the pathway to peace.”

Accordingly, hope free advocate McPherson, who thinks “near term human extinction” is certain, writes, “I recommend living fully. I recommend living with intention. . . . I recommend the pursuit of excellence. I recommend the pursuit of love” (Only Love Remains, p. 175).

Amen.

_____

* Some of you may remember my Oct. 30, 2021, blog post titled “Hopeful, But Not Optimistic.” (Click here if you would like to read it again—or for the first time.)  

** You may want to (re)read this blog article I posted about those churches nearly ten years ago.

*** McPherson (b. 1960) is Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona, where he was a tenured professor from 1989 to 2009. The words cited above are from his 2019 book Only Love Remains: Dancing at the Edge of Extinction (p. 199). He is also the author of "Becoming Hope-Free: Parallels Between Death of Individuals and Extinction of Homo Sapiens," Clinical Psychology Forum, No. 317, May 2019.

In Opposition to Monarchism (and Christian Nationalism)

It is Saturday morning on May 6 as I am writing this. Perhaps many of you are watching the coronation of King Charles III at this time. I am not, intentionally, for I am among the growing number of people who stand in opposition to monarchies in this modern world. 

Archbishop Welby crowning Charles III 

Opposition to the British Monarchy

“God Save Us from Christian Empire” is the name of a May 4 article by Adam Russell Taylor, the president of Sojourners. (It was because of reading that thought-provoking piece that I decided to write this one.)

According to CNN, the coronation in Westminster Abbey was “a symbolic coming together of the monarchy, church, and state for a religious ritual.” The Archbishop of Canterbury anointed Charles III with oil and placed a heavy crown on his head.

Since the days of Henry VIII, the British monarch has been the supreme head of the Church of England and often referred to as the “defender of the faith.”

Taylor calls attention to the problematical “global legacy” of the British Empire. That legacy “includes centuries of exclusion; racism; and plundering of land, resources, and human beings on nearly every continent—a legacy that is inseparable from both the British monarchy and the church.”

In recent years, Barbados and Jamaica have both announced their intention to sever ties with the British crown. Quoting Taylor again,

In both nations, enslaved people were forcibly brought from Africa and toiled in brutal conditions for hundreds of years, all to the economic benefit of the empire and its sovereigns—just one chapter of a long history of the royal family’s role in financing human enslavement that goes back to Queen Elizabeth I.

This is a large part of my ongoing opposition to the British monarchy—but there are other reasons that I will not mention at this time.

Opposition to the Japanese Monarchy

As Wikipedia accurately explains, the “Japanese monarchy is the oldest continuous hereditary monarchy in the world. The Imperial House recognizes 126 monarchs, beginning with Emperor Jimmu (traditionally dated to 11 February 660 BC), and continuing up to the current emperor, Naruhito.”

I remember well the opposition to the monarchy in Japan when Emperor Showa (Hirohito) died in early January 1989, and his son, Emperor Akihito (the present emperor’s father), ascended to the Chrysanthemum Throne.

Freedom of religion is guaranteed by the current constitution of Japan, which went into effect on May 3, 1947 (and May 3 is now Constitutional Memorial Day, a national holiday). There is no state-sanctioned religion in Japan, and the constitution prohibits any religious group from exercising political power.

Accordingly, Japanese Christians, among others, expressed strong opposition to the enthronement ceremonies of the new Emperor in 1990, which was couched in Shinto rituals.

Part of that criticism was linked to the role of the Emperor in the ruthlessness of Japan in expanding the Japanese Empire in the 20^th century, which was partly modeled after the colonial expansion of the British Empire in the previous centuries.

Opposition to Christian Nationalism in the U.S.

Last week my friend Brian Kaylor, president and editor-in-chief of the Baptist periodical Word&Way, posted an article titled “Coronating Christian Nationalism,” indicating how the coronation of George II was giving Christian nationalism “a global spotlight.”

The U.S. fought the Pacific War in opposition to the Japanese monarchy and the concomitant excesses of the Japanese Empire. The U.S. colonists fought the Revolutionary War against King George III and the British Empire which wanted to rule as much territory as possible in North America.

But now there is a dangerous movement of right-wing Christians and politicians to override the principle of the separation of church and state in the U.S. That would make it more like Great Britain now and like Japan of the 1930s in its union of the nation with State Shinto.

Let’s not go there. It’s too late in the world for a King as a religious leader and national allegiance given to that King as a defender of the faith. I stand with the early religious dissenters to the British monarchy and the state church, men such as John Bunyan and Roger Williams.

What about you?

Is President Biden Too Old to Run for Re-Election?

As you doubtlessly know, President Biden announced last week (by this video) that he is running for re-election in 2024. That was not welcomed by some Democrats, even many who are supporters of the President and voted for him in 2020 (as I am and did). The main concern is his advanced age. 

President Biden is already the oldest President in U.S. history—and it is still over 625 days until the end of his present term. If re-elected, he would be expected to serve for another five years and 8½ months from now. That would put him two months past his 86^th birthday.

The President seems to be physically fit now with no major health concerns. But what about 5.7 years from now? There certainly is a possibility that he would be able to finish a second term with no major health issue arising. There perhaps is a stronger possibility that he would not be able to do that.

Yes, I know that people age at different rates. When I was still teaching in my mid-70s, some of my students remarked on how much more vigorous I was than their grandfathers who were the same age. But I wouldn’t have enough energy to teach that once-a-week three-hour evening course now, and I am not yet 85.

There are many things I was able to do when I was 80 that I no longer feel up to—in spite of being in good health. I am not inclined to think it will be markedly different for Pres. Biden. Of course, he would be surrounded by aides, advisors, and a large staff of helpers we ordinary people don’t have.

Does raising questions about Biden’s age indicate agism? According to Ageism.org, “Ageism is the discrimination against an individual strictly on the basis of their age.”

Along with racism, sexism, and ableism, ageism is an ongoing societal problem. People should not be discriminated against and denigrated because of some personal characteristic. All people have equal worth and should be treated with equal respect.

But there is a distinct difference between racism and sexism on the one hand and ableism and ageism on the other. The former pair is based on the idea that those of one race/color are superior to those of another race/color and that males are superior to females.

Some “discrimination” because of the latter pair is not a matter of worth, but of needed abilities to perform certain tasks. If I were needing brain surgery, I wouldn’t want a surgeon with Parkinson’s disease—or an 85-year-old surgeon, for that matter—to perform that surgery.

Does that mean I would be guilty of ableism or ageism? I think not.

Similarly, to raise questions about Pres. Biden being too old to start a second term as President at age 82 is an expression of legitimate concern, not an indication of ageism.

Still, if Pres. Biden is nominated for a second term, I will vote for him. It is looking more and more as if Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for the 2024 presidential election. If he is, I have no doubt but that Pres. Biden, although older, has better physical and mental health.

Some Republican politicians are, of course, saying that voting for Biden would likely end with Vice President Harris becoming President before Biden’s second term would be completed.

Last week it was reported (here, for example) that Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley said that Pres. Biden will likely die within five years and that his supporters would have to count on Vice President Harris if he were to win re-election next year.

And, of course, that could well happen. But that might not be so bad. Last week, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson posted an opinion article regarding the Vice President’s hard job at the present and her suitability to succeed Pres. Biden, if that should be necessary. (You can read that article here without a paywall).

I close with this bit of levity. At last Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Biden joked about his age: he said he believes in the First Amendment that protects freedom of the press, and “not just because my good friend Jimmy Madison wrote it.”