Dear Family,
Even though I’ve never conducted a proper analysis on phrases like, “I prefer to steer clear of politics on Facebook,” I feel reasonably confident asserting that they are followed by the word but and a political pronouncement approximately 100 percent of the time.
Longtime readers of my letters with unusually good memories may recall a few rare occasions over the decades on which I’ve stuck my toe into presidential politics — usually in an effort to be funny.1 It’s sobering to look back at these and realize not only that my attempts at humor seldom land but that my avoidance of political topics generally has less to do with restraint and more to do with the fact that I’m just not that invested in it.
Grace contends that my ability not to care is facilitated by my privilege. She’s right I guess, but what exactly I’m expected to do about this — beyond the self-aggrandizing virtue signaling that all of us do in one way or another (weather permitting and when convenient), which ultimately persuades no one and accomplishes nothing — is less obvious to me.
This month’s political strife, followed by what felt like an unusually emotional political transition, seems to have gotten me to start caring. We’ll see how long it lasts.
It started on January 6th when the mob invaded the Capitol. The upsetting emotions I felt could not have been unique to me. I expect they’re just a natural reaction to witnessing the defilement of a place to which I’ve come to attach a certain level of sanctity.
The sentiment was reminiscent of what I experienced upon learning in 1986 that an armed intruder had taken hostages inside the Washington D.C. Temple.
I’m not sure how many of you remember (or ever heard) the story of the disgruntled church member from Pennsylvania who presented his recommend at the entrance to the baptistry and, upon being told that it was expired, pulled a gun and said something like, “Then can I get in with this?”
I was a high school freshman at the time and, as a result, there’s a zero percent chance that my memory of the details, which I would have picked up entirely via hearsay, is accurate. But contemporary news accounts2 indicate that the gunman took a couple of hostages up to the 7th-floor assembly room where they apparently spent the night.
I wouldn’t have been familiar with that room as a 14 year old or even known that it existed. But I remember the sense of violation I felt when I learned about what had happened — I seem to recall having learned about it while standing in the hallway of the Moorestown (N.J.) Ward meetinghouse from the building custodian,3 but that memory could very well be false. I did not have the same appreciation for the temple then that I have now. But I knew it was a sacred place and it hurt to think of someone behaving that way inside of it
I felt the same way on January 6th.
The next day, January 7th, Lucy and I drove Sophie to Reagan National so she could return to BYU for the winter semester, which began the following week. Lucy and I were still feeling a little scarred from the previous day’s events — I don’t remember ever having seen Lucy watch TV news as intently or with as much concern as on January 6th. And so instead of driving directly home from the airport, we hopped over Memorial Bridge, drove down Independence Avenue and then north on 3rd Street4 along the “west front” of the Capitol (the front that faces the Mall) — just to assure ourselves that it was still okay.
The following Saturday, January 9th, Crystal I rode our bikes together down to the Capitol. By then they had already started erecting the imposing black steel fencing that would ultimately give much of downtown the look and feel of a war zone. A large truck carrying some of the fencing drove past us as we rode along First Street (the road that runs between the “east front” of the Capitol and the Supreme Court). They were putting up fencing literally where we stood as we posed for pictures. It would be a couple weeks before ordinary people like us were allowed on First Street again.
About a week before the inauguration, my friend, neighbor, longtime staffer for Senator Gordon Smith, former FEMA/current USDA employee, and fellow bishopric counselor5 Richard Krikava invited me to join him on him on his quadrennial bike ride downtown for the inauguration.
Crystal and I have now lived here for seven presidential inaugurations (President Clinton’s second inaugural in 1997 — a month after Hannah was born — was our first) but we’d never ventured downtown for it. I’ve always thought about it, but it’s always been too cold or too whatever.
January 20th wasn’t especially cold this year — started off maybe around 40? Not balmy, but not cold either. The idea still gave me pause though because I knew the city was going to locked down, no one was getting anywhere near the Mall, and I was afraid of getting caught in a riot. But Richard, drawing on his experience as a native of Portland, Ore., felt comfortable in his ability to steer clear of violent nut jobs and persuaded me to come.
And so we went.
By January 20th, the city looked like nothing I’d seen before. I’ve never been to Baghdad and you probably haven’t either. But assuming you’re old enough, you probably have a picture in your mind of how Baghdad looked about 15 years ago. That’s the image Washington evoked as we biked around it on Inauguration Day. Every street within three blocks of the Mall was blocked off by a sea of concrete Jersey barriers, trucks, buses, armored vehicles parked sideways across the road, miles of the tall, heavy black fencing they were putting up when Crystal and I rode down 11 days earlier, and literally thousands of soldiers holding big, scary-looking long guns.
The soldiers were everywhere — seemingly at every intersection as we approached the restricted areas. Closer to the Capitol, the black fencing was topped with razor wire. Inside, armed troops stood shoulder to shoulder. I’d never seen anything like it.
The fencing surrounding the Mall seemed pretty airtight. But because Washington was designed by a Parisian who seemingly only resorted to right angles when absolutely necessary,6 we managed to inadvertently pedal into places we weren’t supposed to be on at least three occasions. This resulted in multiple encounters with armed troops in which we’d apologetically explain (truthfully!) that we were just trying to figure out how to leave.
“It’s okay man,” one soldier told us while pointing to a fence opening where we could exit. “You’re still in the United States…I think.”
He actually said, “I think,” which was perhaps the most disconcerting thing anyone’s said to me so far this year.
At around 10:30 we rolled into Richard’s favorite Capitol Hill pizza joint (and now my favorite Capitol Hill pizza joint) fittingly named “We, the Pizza.” As we finished whatever one calls a meal eaten at 10:45 in the morning7 we noticed that it had grown colder and more overcast and was actually starting to snow a little.
(Incidentally, we saw about 20,000 people with firearms but we didn’t call 911.)
The snow concerned me since I wasn’t dressed for it and I was starting to shiver. Fortunately, it didn’t last. The sky had started clearing by the time Jennifer Lopez sang “This Land is Your Land,” and the vice-presidential and presidential oath taking actually seemed to have the effect of bringing the sun out. The ride home was warm and pleasant.8
I won’t go so far as to suggest that an abrupt return of sunshine and warmth that coincided with the official transfer of power was a sign of divine approval, but it was nice.
About 2,000 words ago I implied that a political statement might be forthcoming, and here it is: President Biden is Dad’s age (78). Trump is 74. Anthony Fauci and Nancy Pelosi are both 80, and Russel M. Nelson is 96. With the possible exception of Trump, these people all work a lot harder than I do. The Social Security retirement age should be raised to 70.
That’s it for me. See you in four years.
Sophie seems to settling in well to the new semester. (Did I mention she rolled a 4.0 last semester? I didn’t? Well, she did. I wonder what that’s like.) She and her roommates have apparently gone off sugar. As someone who has quit sugar more times than the average smoker has quit cigarettes, I admire the effort and wish her good luck with that.
Sophie is also the girl responsible for coordinating all the “home evening groups” in her ward. Covid has complicated this of course, but the Utah Area Presidency allegedly9 took it upon themselves to either authorize, encourage, or mandate (I don’t know which) “pods” as large as three apartments (as many as 18 people) to gather for social activities in close quarters and basically interact as though they live together. Sounds a little on the reckless side to me, and I’m probably not alone in that view. But I don’t live there and even if I did, pushing back on the Area Presidency doesn’t comport well with our culture (and would be a waste of time).
All that notwithstanding, according to Sophie, the president of the university apparently saw fit to push back and put the kibosh on the larger pods. This makes sense to Sophie but as of Sunday she was unclear on what she was supposed to do. I can’t say I know the answer to that, but I can say I love me a good turf war — especially when I’m not a party to it.
Speaking of turf wars, a couple of weeks ago our local school board announced that it was aiming to start phasing into in-person instruction as early as March 15th if various public health criteria could be met by then. Shortly thereafter the governor announced that everyone in the state would/should be back in school by March 1st. The county board of education seemed a little blindsided by that and I’m looking forward to seeing how it all plays out.
As I’ve admitted for the past several months, I don’t claim to know what the right answer is here, and I’m glad it’s not my decision to make. But when I poked my head into Grace’s bedroom at 8:57 on one particularly cold morning last week to make sure she was ready for school, I found her set up with her laptop in bed under a pile of blankets.
Earlier in the school year, she had decried remote learning as “all the sucky parts of school without any of the fun stuff.” And so I asked her something like, “Can you honestly tell me you’d rather be at school than where you are right now?”
“No,” the always-honest Grace replied from inside her cocoon, “this is actually pretty great.”
She also still likes coding — and probably not just because she can do it from the comfort of her bedroom. That makes me happy.
Lucy and Crystal painted Lucy’s room last weekend. The color is called “fresh croissant” and it looks nice. The best part was when it came time to rehang the curtains. The anchors securing that thing to the wall that the curtain rod sits atop10 had failed and a new hole needed to be drilled and properly reinforced.
“Your dad can help with that,” Crystal told Lucy. “Why don’t you ask him?”
I could write another five hundred words on what happened next but most of them would be obscenities. Suffice it to say that curtains are back up, but Lucy’s newly painted wall looks to have borne the brunt of a drive-by shooting.
Competent people. How I admire and envy them.
We wish our new president the best in his efforts to foster unity in a country that can’t even seem to agree on the definition of the word.
Let’s keep it civil, folks!
Love, Tim et al
Managing Editor of The Famlet Monthly
- These letters, which go back nearly a quarter-century, are all out in the open and not especially hard to find. I leave them out there even though they sometimes express views that have not aged well or otherwise embarrass me. Consider it vain, symbolic pushback against a viciously unforgiving culture that insists on holding everybody accountable for every stupid thing they’ve ever said, written, done, or even thought, no matter how long ago. Our religious doctrine paradoxically (yet reassuringly) posits an omniscient Deity who is capable of forgetting my sins. It’s a damning condemnation of human nature that non-omniscient strangers can’t do the same.
- An admittedly cursory Google search turned up an AP story and something in the Washington Post. Not surprisingly, both articles contain factual inaccuracies about both the Church and the temple — nothing malicious, just typical reporter laziness, relying on local-yokel “church officials” for background information (which may or may not actually be true) and then extrapolating garbage that no “church official” (no matter how local or yokel) would ever say. (From the Post: “The temple, the first major Mormon tabernacle on the east coast, is nearly twice as large as the mother tabernacle in Salt Lake City.” I wouldn’t know where to begin deconstructing that train-wreck of an assertion.) But I’m assuming they got the details of the intrusion correct.
- History lesson kids! It’s hard for you to believe, I’m sure, but we didn’t always have to clean the church — we used to hire pros to do it!
- or possibly 4th Street but I think it was 3rd
- Even though our irregularly shaped ward covers some 26 square miles (yes, I’ve actually calculated this) and is home to somewhere north of 100,000 people, all three current members of our bishopric are clustered in the same neighborhood near the ward’s southern border. It’s far from the fanciest neighborhood in our ward — modest I think is an apt adjective — but it’s arguably our ward’s most convenient neighborhood to D.C., especially on a bike. Perhaps not coincidentally, all three of us are cyclists.
- My favorite part of this Washington Post story is the quote from Remi Louf of France’s Institute of Theoretical Physics: “The distinct feature of [Paris and Washington] is the presence of radiating avenues that were built to connect different points in the city, and that do not respect the layout’s underlying geometry.” A wonderfully French way of saying, “The street layout is a mess.”
- I don’t usually eat before noon or after 6 p.m. and traditional meal names have lost most of their meaning.
- Full disclosure: Even though we were just a few blocks away, we couldn’t actually hear the proceedings. Richard was playing them through his C-SPAN app as we pedaled along the fence line.
- I should have put allegedly in boldface since you’re getting everything in this paragraph and the next one at least fourth-hand
- I don’t actually know what anything in my house is called and lack the competence to even ask for help at The Home Depot. “Uh, I need one of those thingies that screws onto the bottom of the other thingy…”