My wife and I have a saying: The next big thing. It’s is a term we use to describe something on the horizon that we need to prepare for, and it could be anything.
The next big thing for us could be something important to a few key people, like an upcoming birthday or the next podcast interview. It could be something that affects many people, like a summer camp, a concert, or school starting up again. And sometimes, the next big thing affects everyone, like Christmas or the U.S. presidential election.
What is the next big thing in your life? Is it a doctor appointment, a court hearing, or maybe a vacation? Is the next big thing something you’re dreading? Or one that you’re looking forward to?
I’d like to posit that the next big thing for Americans is whether or not freedom will continue — whether or not a few deplorable actors in Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Philadelphia will be allowed to skate on their crimes and disappear into the ether with the booty afforded them from powerful enablers, and along with it, your liberty.
You may be too busy to think about all that. You may say, “I’m not political. And I just want to love my neighbors.”
Well, friend, I hate to be the one to break this to you, but just about everything in your life was affected by politics in the past year. If you’re planning on maintaining political apathy, you’ll only have yourself to blame in the turbulent years ahead as what few freedoms you retain – like the freedom to reject a vaccination, perhaps – is stripped from you and the ones you care about.
Still too busy to think about it? Still think it’s merely a matter for political junkies, or kooky conspiracy stuff?
That’s fine, move along, but think back to when the next big thing was some new movie’s opening day. You and bunch of your friends sat down in the crowded theater, wore whatever you wanted, and laughed or cried because the epic drama and dastardly authoritarianism was contained to the fictional universe on the screen.
Remember when the next big thing was inviting your friends and family to celebrate your child’s graduation, wedding, or baptism?
Or maybe the next big thing was that business expansion you’d been working toward, opening up that second restaurant and deciding how best to lay out your increased seating capacity. That was before the politics supplanted science and common sense. Instead, the next big thing will be calling up your employees and letting them know you can’t afford to keep them.
Maybe you were the one laid off, and the next big thing is that job interview with Costco (they seem to be doing pretty well), which is good because somehow you need to figure out how to pay the rent, and $600 doesn’t cover it.
For countless folks in nursing homes, the next big thing used to be that semi-regular visit from the kids and grandkids, the simple balm for the achy burn of isolation. It’s a pity we don’t allow those anymore.
Still think politics don’t concern you? Okay, I understand. There are a thousand issues competing for your time, and perhaps I should sign this off and go play outside with my kids, or call up that buddy and shoot the breeze over coffee while I still can.
Who knows, maybe the next big thing will be a massive celebration and victory over liars and cheats. Perhaps we’ll sing and dance, free of fear from the heavy-handed administrators and their cast-off mandates. I pray that is the case and I hope it will come to pass, but we can choose today to do the hard things (and the simple things) to ensure it does — like get involved with those political functions that affect us, whether we want them to or not.
But maybe we are too busy for all of that. In that case, the next big thing might be a circled date on a future calendar, a random Friday perhaps, the date specified by the authorities gracious enough to allow a tearful round of farewell hugs before being hauled away from our family for not bowing to their will. It’s happened before, in America even, though there were few who believed it would ever happen again.
Perhaps then, as now, some people were just too busy to notice those political issues, or too busy to care.
Photo credit: Members of the Mochida family awaiting an evacuation bus for Japanese internment in the Second World War. Identification tags were used to aid in keeping the family unit intact during all phases of evacuation. [Dorothea Lange – U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. Public Domain.]
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