One of the aspects of the religio-social culture of the prevailing faith where I live is an emphasis on perfection, particularly as it applies to women and their appearance and to their families. There’s a definite pressure on women to be the perfect wife and have the perfect family with the perfect number of children (5).

This obviously takes a toll on women, seeing as women, especially married women, in Utah have a higher percentage of use of anti-depressants than in any other state, and a third of all women in Utah suffer depression, more than twice the rate for men.

I’ve been walking for my exercise for the nearly thirty years I’ve lived in Cedar City, and I always see women, particularly younger women, usually jogging, often pushing strollers, at all hours. I see a few men, but I’d estimate that there are ten women for every man I see, and almost all the men I see appear to be around my age. The women also appear to have more gym memberships.

This need to present a façade of perfection permeates everything. Even death. Utah also has one of the highest rates of teen suicide, but that never gets much press. When a teenager dies in Utah, and no cause of death is listed, there’s a high probability that it was suicide.

Last week, in the neighboring community of Enoch, the owner of a local insurance agency killed his wife, his mother-in-law, his five children, and then committed suicide, and all the news stories mentioned how wonderful a family they had been, and what a tragedy it was. Except, everything clearly wasn’t that wonderful. Under questioning, the Enoch police chief mentioned that there had been three calls over the past several years about “domestic disturbances,” but that there had been no charges. It also turned out that the wife had filed for divorce and that her husband had been served divorce papers just a few days before the shooting. Most of these details either didn’t appear in the local press or were buried.

This is scarcely new. Several years ago, two teenage males were killed in a stabbing incident here in Cedar City. The only news released was that the deaths occurred, and that the matter was “resolved.” More than a few cases of embezzlement have been hushed up as well as other incidents, and those are only the ones I know about.

But everything is perfect here in Deseret.

As all my family, and many of my readers know, I have a penchant for vests, both dressy and every day. So it was no surprise when I received black wool winter vest from a family member – delayed more than a week by the recent storm that savaged the mid-section of the United States. At first glance, it appeared to be a slightly dressier version of an older vest.

Then I noticed the glossy, multi-colored and professionally printed card attached to the vest, topped with the words, CONCEALED CARRY. Directly below that was the image of a revolver on top of a U.S. flag, beneath which were the words, in smaller caps, SECOND AMMENDMENT [spelled exactly that way], followed by a paragraph declaring that the maker/seller of the vest supported the right of citizens to bear arms and to carry licensed and concealed firearms.

A second and more careful inspection of the vest revealed pockets and straps inside designed to hold two revolvers – one on each side. Above the left-hand inside straps was a machine embroidered six-bullet-point list for safe use of the straps.

It’s rather unlikely I’ll be using the vest for its apparently intended purpose, particularly since I don’t have a concealed carry permit, but, since it is a handsome vest, I’ll certainly wear it.

But what puzzles me the most is how a fairly well-known retailer/manufacturer could go to all of the trouble of designing, manufacturing, and selling such a vest – and then fail to spell “amendment” correctly.

Or aren’t most of those who would buy the vest able to tell that “AMMENDMENT” was misspelled, or does it matter in the slightest to them? In this regard, I have noticed that many of those who cite the Second Amendment most vociferously have the least understanding of what it means, legally and constitutionally, so why would a mere misspelling matter in the slightest? Just as a certain segment of the House Republicans apparently have no real understanding of their responsibility to govern and how to exercise that responsibility.

While over 70% of Americans now believe that climate change is real, only about 50% of Republicans do, not that the discrepancy between Democrats and Republicans surprises me, given that Democrats are, in general, much more prone to accept “new” findings (even those that turn out not to be true or accurate), while Republicans tend to be older and more conservative, and conservatives are much slower to change their views on anything, even when the facts are overwhelming.

But, in one way, that still surprises me, because age does offer a perspective that youth lacks. When I lived in New Hampshire some thirty years ago, just above Newfound Lake, the lake froze so solid that every winter the lake was dotted with little ice-fishing huts, and even stake trucks were routinely driven on the ice. Now, one of my daughters reports that over several recent years, the lake didn’t ice over at all. The spotty local records indicate that there’s no record of the lake not freezing over before 2000.

I’ve lived in Cedar City for almost thirty years, and in the first ten years, we almost invariably had periods of sub-zero weather [Fahrenheit]. The infrequent snowstorms were usually severe (ten to twenty-five inches), and the local museum has a plethora of pictures illustrating just that. Until about five or six years ago, we never got rain in winter. In just the last few years, we’ve been getting winter rain, when before all the precipitation was snow. Now the infrequent storms are even less frequent, and the moisture content usually far less, and for the last week, we’ve had rain, finally turning to snow as I write this.

Whole sections of pine forests in the mountains are covered with beetle-killed pines. Why? Because, it turns out, that what kills the beetles most effectively is weeks of sub-zero winter weather, and we haven’t had anything like that in the three decades I’ve lived here.

Now, the recollections of an older man should be taken with caution, unless the statistics back them up, which in this case they do. But now that the statistics are out there, why do so many conservative older people fail to see the trends?

Sometimes, it’s called the myth of the Frontier, or “Superman,” or “Rambo,” or even Trump, but in the end, this all too popular myth infuses American culture. The basic idea is that “the others” are evil, and that only the chosen one can put things right, because the laws are ineffectual or even part of the evil.

Yet, for all the growing popularity of the myth of “the One,” for the most part, the myth is not only a fallacy, but its popularity undermines the very roots of society.

Take a good look at history. In recent years, archaeologists have discovered that once upon a time, there were a good number of human species and forebears, and given the rate that more ancestral species are being dug up (literally), it’s like that we’ll find even more. All of that raises the question as to why homo sapiens is the only one to survive.

Although archaeologists don’t like speculating on why this is so, as a F&SF writer I don’t have that problem, and, to me, at least, the answer is simple. For all our infighting, based on the evidence so far unearthed, homo sapiens is and was the most social of all primate species, and apparently the only species able to live in larger groups.

That cooperation is what allowed the development of technology. No matter how bright an individual is, the requirements for survival require pooling efforts, initiative, and intelligence to get above a hunter-gatherer existence, and the higher the level of technology and standard of living one desires, the more cooperation that is required.

Unfortunately, the myth of individual inspiration or sole genius (an offshoot corollary of the myth of “the One”) also pervades society, particularly American society, often ignoring actual facts. Despite all the citations, James Watt didn’t invent the steam engine from whole cloth. He improved on the design of Thomas Newcomen, who in turn had improved on the initial design of Thomas Savery. Isaac Newton acknowledged that his discoveries were based on the discoveries of those before him.

This has been the pattern of all technological development and materials science. History has also shown, rather conclusively, that government by dictator is unstable and unworkable over any period of time, and that broad-based governments that acknowledge individual rights and responsibilities under law tend to be more stable.

Yet today in the United States, too many people are still flocking to the myth of “the One,” looking for the one person [usually male] who can save them and the country. They overlook the fact that, like it or not, messy as it’s been, Joe Biden has, through cooperation and persuasion, accomplished more in two years than Trump did in his entire term.

Conservatives often cite Ronald Reagan as “the man,” but most of them who cite him weren’t there. I was, and I actually served in the Reagan Administration, which was remarkably decentralized and cooperative [admittedly with several major gaffes and disasters] and was anything but one-man-rule.

The real solution to current problems lies in rejecting the myth of “the One” and all it’s corollaries and permutations (such as the idea that only one political party represents “truth” and the way), and returning to constructive cooperation. “One man” ideas will only divide us more.

The last days of the 117th Congress are dribbling away, and the remaining question is whether the Democrats will fumble the ball, so to speak, and subject the nation to a total mess in January, when Republicans theoretically take over the House of Representatives, with dubious leadership, if it can even be called that, given something like 170 of the 222 Republican members of the House are essentially election-deniers and the far-right wingnuts currently have enough votes to deny Kevin McCarthy the Speaker’s gavel. In short, there are even more Republican nay-sayers than ever before, and that doesn’t bode well for anything constructive.

Democrats ought to understand that NOTHING constructive will get done in the next six months, if not longer, given that the Republican nutjobs are focused on investigations and impeachments that will solve nothing, because, first, Hunter Biden hasn’t ever been a member of the Biden administration and his father never had any financial ties to his son’s business dealings, and second, any impeachment of either Joe Biden or any other administration official will go nowhere in the Senate, if it even gets that far.

For all that, and the Democratic rhetoric that they have a “framework” to work out an overall appropriations bill for the fiscal year ending in September, I have to say that I worry that the progressives and the more conservative Democrats will get hung up over pet projects and peeves and lose sight of what can be done while insisting on what cannot be done, especially in four days.

Yes, Biden and the Democrats have actually accomplished a lot, but much of that will be undone without an overall appropriations bill to fund some of those programs. Democrats also need to realize that they’ll be the ones held accountable if the money’s not there, and Kevin McCarthy would like nothing better than to gut programs and blame it on the Democrats.

So… will the Democrats come up with something sensible that can be passed, or will they attempt a massive and futile Hail Mary spending bill… and undercut all they’ve accomplished?