There’s Not Enough!

It’s a State of Mind

How’s your supply of toilet paper these days?  I always found it weird that, when faced with a mysterious pandemic of epic proportions, the first thing most Americans thought of was wiping their butts.  Maybe they were just buying paper towels to wipe down surfaces (which we recently discovered, after doing it for a year, was a total waste of time) and thought, hey, I might as well get a couple dozen rolls of TP as well.  Honestly, I don’t know what goes through people’s minds.  But at the dreadfully frightening beginning of the coronavirus, the question I most frequently heard was not, Are you okay?  Are you well?  But: Do you have any idea where I can get some toilet paper?

Now what everyone is worried about is gasoline.

I have the bizarre habit every morning at 6:00 AM of sitting in my room in Durham, North Carolina and staring at the wall for an hour.  Often, to get some fresh air, I open a window.  And I can tell you, from the constant roar I hear from interstate 85, which is maybe a quarter mile away, that there is still plenty of gas in the Southeastern United States.  Cars, trucks, and motorcycles are roaring along, even at that early hour.

Still, people think they don’t have enough gas.

A friend of mine once read a study which claimed to name the phrase most often used in American movies.  I might have guessed I love you, or Stick ‘em up, but apparently the most used phrase was Let’s get outta here.  That is the hope and the dream that most Americans cherish, getting the hell out of here.  I think the reason most people fear not having enough gas is that they won’t be able to get outta here.  They’ll be stuck.  They’ll lose their independence.  (Their next greatest fear, of course, is that they won’t be able to wipe their butt.)

Where, exactly, do they want to go?  Someplace that has more gas?  Someplace that has lots of toilet paper?  Someplace where they’ll be free of the coronavirus?  (Good luck with that.)  The answer is unclear.  They just don’t want to be here.

One thing I noticed during the pandemic year is that this fear of being stuck in the same place has gotten out of control, probably because most people were stuck in the same place.  When people did get in their cars, they drove at a furious pace, as if desperate to get somewhere, even though there was nowhere to go.  (Most of them were apparently going to Lowes.)  I sometimes thought this was my imagination, but my wife agreed: people were driving like hell.  In both cities I occupied—Durham and Asheville (where my wife and I have a cabin)—motorcyclists seemed to gather at night and roar around the roads, as if they were taking off on some wild trip.  Then, presumably, they would go back to the place where they were holed up for the pandemic, and stay there.  Was it really so bad, that they had to pretend to go somewhere?

The reason there seems to be a shortage of these important products is not that there actually is a shortage, but that people panic buy, depleting the supplies.  Everybody else is doing this, they seem to think, so if I don’t do it, I won’t have enough!  It’s a weird circular argument, or a self-fulfilling prophecy (I’m having trouble pinning this sucker down).  People are saying, I gotta be able to wipe my butt and get the hell outta here, and therefore we don’t have enough of anything.

My favorite story in the Bible is the loaves and fishes.  Some people in my part of the country—especially the people who are riding those motorcycles, or topping off their pickup trucks and filling five more cans with gas to put in the back—believe that the gist of this story is that Jesus and his disciples had a rather pathetic amount of food to share with his followers, but Almighty God saw the situation and miraculously transformed it into a hell of a lot of food, so that it could feed hundreds, thousands.

But the explanation I prefer—which I heard in a sermon years ago—is that everybody in that huge crowd had brought food (what were they, stupid?) but were afraid to take it out because they thought other people would want some of it and they wouldn’t have enough.  When Jesus demonstrated a more relaxed attitude—let’s just pass these loaves and fishes around and see what happens—it turned out they had all brought loves and fishes of their own.  By the time the disciples gathered up the leftovers, there was more than they started with.  They could all have had seconds!  It was a miracle.

The miracle was that people didn’t cling greedily to what they had.  They shared with others.

We need that miracle now.  If people would just relax their grips, and realize there actually is enough, we could all get where we need to go and wipe our butts when we get there.  It would be just like olden times.

Actually, they didn’t have toilet paper in those days, or gasoline for that matter.  How did they wipe their butts?