Alternatives

The world offers up swelling heaps of fake alternatives. They pour down from an obscure sky like dried up drops of cardboard rain. The thunder you hear and the lightening you see is just hype.

Our own days are filled with fake alternatives. We proudly sneer at the ones that fool others, but we each revel in our own comfy chair of glitzy, mythic life givers. Causes, objects, movements, beliefs and artistic expressions are all around us, clamoring to be the next thing that seems to matter.

Pretend alternatives thrive for several reasons. We are easily bored by the same old thing, and even false alternatives promise a relief from boredom. We love the feeling that we are rebelling against the status quo, and we buy the seditious rhetoric even when we can plainly see the links back to one of the standard rhetoric factories. The status quo merely changes its clothing or theme song and we are immediately mesmerized; it feels so good to have hope again, and to feel the freshness from a spray can.

But the deepest and most tragic reason for our complicity is that most of us assume, in some secret soul closet, that “things” are not as they should be, and we just know that “someone” is going to “change”. . . “things” . . . “someday.” So we take seriously labels such as “alternative music” or “alternative rock,” which keeps the name even after all of its creators are millionaires with Emmies and their own television shows.

So “alternative medicine” is a multimillion dollar corporate project with retail outlets all over the world, and countless physicians and hospitals who push it for mere ego gratification and profit. So “alternative lifestyles” turn out to be little more than more discontent, unhealthy people splicing themselves together.

“Alternative television” turns out to be just another network. “Alternative education” is more unmotivated students in classrooms, or living rooms turned into classrooms. “Alternative religions” are just silly people sharing silly old ideas dressed up in tomorrow's business suit, until their silly leader demonstrates how psychotic he was all along.

Alternative foods, fuels, communities, media. How we love the possibilities. Someday, a woman with a dainty head covering will sit churning butter and singing hymns in her log cabin while her husband of thirty years is out hunting for dinner and the kids are over in the corner studying Latin grammar by candlelight, and somebody will think to call it an alternative lifestyle and it will suddenly become all the rage for a week or two.

What is most striking is that any real alternative will simply be a rediscovery of something old, tested, proven, eternal. If it gains any success in the traditional sense, it will immediately become the status quo and someone else will have to come along with something else.
Here's an idea that strikes me as a True alternative idea: true alternatives are very seldom noticed, and are not very impressive when they are noticed. That is no excuse for mediocrity. Quite the contrary: the reason most movies, politicians, religions, automobiles and ideas need so much hype is that they really are mediocre.

When was the last time an advertising agency was paid mountains of money to get people to notice, well, a mountain? A lush forest? A husband and father that keeps showing up at a tedious job to support his family? Forgiveness? Oxygen? Rhythm?

The time was when people with some kind of talent would sit in their homes or in someone else's home and perform, and people would appreciate it. Now, that is a dead or dying practice, because if something cannot be done wonderfully, it evidently should not be done it all. If I cannot be in the NBA, I should not play basketball. If I can not look in the mirror every morning and see a movie star, I am by definition ugly. If I am not completely satisfied by my possessions, then I do not yet earn enough money.

Mostly of course, what really doesn't exist anywhere is a true alternative to the religions of our time, including the Christianish religion. The more the churches and denominations multiplied, the less distinguishable they became. Like the multiplication of stations for cable television: Their number is immense; the sum total of excellence has not changed since the sixties. And as always, the only true alternative is the primitive - the faith and life and practice of Jesus.

Dear God, make what I do something closer to a True Alternative. Put a portion of your glory into something of mine that is otherwise unworthy of notice.