Eddie is full of despair. He wants to give up and take the welfare checks forever. He said the best time of his life was COVID, because he got to watch TV and got $600 a week for doing nothing. What would you say to Eddie?
Hey, welcome to Politics by Faith, brought to you by the Patriot Gold Corp. We have a really interesting moment in the show today. Eddie, from Massachusetts, called in. It all built to this, so let me give a quick review. We started off talking about Alexis de Tocqueville and how when he came to America in 1831 and wrote, in 1835, Democracy in America, he talked about what tyranny will look like
in this free country we call America. Now here we are 200 years later and he was spot on. That turned into a conversation about personal responsibility. We've talked a lot about making America healthy again lately on the show and it's great.
You talk about RFK getting rid of food dyes and all these other things, okay? But that has its limits. That's, let's just say, half of the equation. We can debate over what percent it is, but let's say half. There's another half, if we really want to make the difference that needs to be made.
So, sure, we can take the red dye 40 out of Froot Loops. But also, maybe we shouldn't eat Froot Loops. You with me? We'll take the red dye out of it, but also we shouldn't eat it at all. So what could happen is we take the red dye
out of Froot Loops and then we just eat a bunch of Froot Loops still. Are we gonna be healthier? No, maybe, I guess, but not really.
We're not gonna be healthy.
Maybe we'll be healthier, but we're not gonna be healthy. So that got into a conversation about hillbillyology and some tough love that J.D. Vance, our next vice president, gave us in that book. He wrote, we read a bunch, but let's do this. J.D. said, psychologists call it learned helplessness.
When a person believes, as I did during my youth, that the choices I made had no effect on the outcomes of my life. Whenever people ask me what I'd like to most change about the white working class, I say the feeling that our choices don't matter. The message of the right is increasingly, it's not your fault that you're a loser, it's the government's fault.
I don't know what the answer is precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better. People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown, Ohio. You can walk through a town where 30% of the young men work fewer than 20 hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness. A lot of students just don't understand what's out there. A teacher told me, shaking her
head, you have these kids who plan on being baseball players who don't even play on the high school team because the coaches mean to them. There's a cultural moment in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government and that movement gains adherence by the day. So we talked about learned helplessness, we had some people call in who work in welfare offices
and what they've seen, some people work as therapists, some addiction counselors. And then we had someone call in who's like in the exercise world and he's like, just go get him, like get to work, bootstraps, workout, that whole thing, like let's go.
And it was great. And then Eddie called in. Eddie is 56, works at a printing press and Eddie is tired he's tired he said I got my bachelor's degree didn't help I make $23 an hour he's got a wife and two kids and he wants to give up and so we just did all the show about you know let's go let's get going, motivational talk, be better, all the rest.
And he's like, I just want to give up. And I just want to take the welfare check. So does that make me a bad person? He said the best time of his life was COVID. Got 600 bucks a week, check in the mail, didn't do nothing. Watch TV all day.
I've never talked to this person. I've never talked to someone like this.
And then we had to take a break.
And I'm like, all right, well, let's, what do we do for Eddie? What do we say? What do you say to someone who's tired? Let's meet him where he is first.
I feel for him.
He's been working his whole life, making $23 an hour. He got his bachelor's degree because everyone told him to. So he got scammed.
Let's just be real about it. It's a scam.
hour. He got his bachelor's degree because everyone told him to. So he got scammed. Let's just be real about it. It's a scam. Oh you're gonna make this much more. He won't and he didn't. So that was a waste of time and money and I'd feel really bitter about that too. First thing that comes to mind is sloth. Sloth is bad. Sloth is a sin. If you read Dante's Inferno, which you should, layer five is sloth. And the punishment for people who lived in this sin
is you are drowning in the river Styx for all of eternity. And so you're in perpetual drowning forever. And you're stuck underneath the water and you can't climb your way to the top because you lived a life of such sloth that you can't even be bothered to try to get up
and breathe inside Dante's Inferno here. So you're just stuck underneath drowning constantly forever. So Eddie has that sloth in him. We all do. It's all part of our sinful nature, some more than others. And I think someone has called, he said the word spark.
That word stuck out to me, whether maybe he didn't say it, maybe the Holy Spirit did, but I heard the word spark and I think what I would say to Eddie is you're never going to get the money you want. That was part of it.
All right.
23 bucks an hour.
It's not going to happen, man. It's not. You're never going to live that life of wealth. And that's hard in today's world because I've talked to many World War II veterans who are like, I grew up in poverty. I didn't even know it.
So now if you grow up not making a lot of money, you know it. So that's hard. And it's never going to happen. You're never going to get ahead. So you just got to put that aside. And you got to be content with 23 an hour.
But the good news is, that's not the point of life. When you go to heaven, it's not based off of, or when you die, and God's deciding whether or not you go to heaven or not, it's not based off how much money you make per hour. Not even close. And while we're here on earth, it's all about your daily bread. So we got to focus, be grateful for that
and then focus on the things that are in our control. That is serving the Lord and loving people. It doesn't matter how much money you make. You can make a million a year. Loving God and your neighbor and serving your wife and kids is the most important thing right now. When you die, Eddie, no one is going to be at your funeral and say, Here lieth a man who made $23 an hour.
Well, it's possible that your kids could say, here's my dad who loved me and played with me and helped me when I needed him and listened to me and worked so hard, got up every day and worked hard at the printing press and was able to scrape together what he could
and bought this thing for me for Christmas one year and I'll never forget it and all that whatever right but those stories are still within your reach even if you're only making $23 an hour so if that's getting you down you gotta refocus your life on something else because you're never going to find fulfillment in your job and maybe you shouldn't either but there are other parts of your life where you can definitely still find that fulfillment. Now I know that's easy for me to say.
I'm not on my feet nine hours a day like he is. That was the best I could offer something like that. We had a bunch of other calls after that saying, hey man, there's no freedom in that life that you think you want. And this is what Alexis de Tocqueville talked about. You think sitting on the couch watching TV all day is freedom, but it's not. Someone called
in and said, sitting and watching TV all day, that is the life of someone in jail. Someone in jail sits around and watches TV all day. And so does Eddie. So he's incarcerating himself. I always go back to the Bible, this may not speak, I bet it speaks to everyone listening to this podcast, but not to everyone on SiriusXM radio, but I mean it's all in the Bible, Colossians 3, 23, it says, whatever you do, work heartily as for the Lord and not for men.
That's so incredibly insightful. You're not working for you or money or this business or the man. You're working for God and your work glorifies Him. Our pilgrims knew this profoundly. Sloth is running away from your responsibilities. It's running away from heartily working.
It's running away from your potential. And you're choosing to remain spiritually and morally stagnant. I read someone said you're running away from God and the fullness of life He's offering you. You're not cultivating the gifts and the talents that God gave you or the people that he put you around, put around you.
You're not participating in God's continual work of creation and redemption. You're just giving up on it all. And that's sinful. The Greek word is akidia. It means absence of care.
I read this, spiritual listlessness. This is how the fourth century Egyptian monk, Avargrius Ponticus, describes Aikidia, the spiritual malaise whose name has no equivalent in a modern language and whose nuances include disgust with life, boredom, discouragement. This is Eddie Tuati, if you heard his voice. Laziness, sleepiness, melancholy, sadness, lack of enthusiasm and motivation. Aikidia is a sort of asphyxiation or suffocation of the spirit that condemns those
who suffer from it to unhappiness by causing them to reject what they have or the situation in which they live, whether it's work, emotional, social, and to dream about another situation that's unattainable. That's it. That's perfect. That's the old, that's the biblical word, the Greek word, I'm rejecting, I'm unhappy because I'm rejecting where I am, and I'm going to dream about another situation and just become bitter about it, and then not care and give up and be discouraged and all the rest.
I bought a couple of books on Puritan prayers. That's all this, just prayers that the Puritans gave, said. And a common theme of all of them is our own wretchedness, which is not very fashionable today, but also how weary life is in our fallen world. It is a weary world. Weary is a great word, isn't it?
Weary.
Here's one of these prayers. I confess my sin, my frequent sin, my sinful, my willful sin. All my powers of body and soul are defiled. A fountain of pollution is deep within my nature. There are chambers of foul images within my being. I have gone from one odious room to another, walk in a no-man's land of dangerous imaginations, pried into the secrets of my fallen nature. I am utterly ashamed that I am what I am in myself.
I have no green shoot in me nor fruit but thorn and thistles. I am a fading leaf that the wind drives away. I live bare and barren as a winter tree, unprofitable, fit to be honed down and burnt. Lord, you have mercy on me. To just live in that state is no good. And that's where Eddie is. He's just there.
But then we have God. Oh, what blessedness accompanies devotion, when under all the trials that weary me, the cares that corrode me, the fears that disturb me, the infirmities that oppress me, I can come to you in my need and feel peace beyond understanding." That's what Eddie doesn't have, the peace beyond understanding. The Puritan said,
Let me willingly accept misery, sorrow, temptations, if I can thereby feel sin is the greatest evil and be delivered from it with gratitude to you acknowledging this as the highest testimony of your love once you know how depraved you are that just makes you all the more grateful for your salvation and I know it's maybe is it a sin to be discouraged in the moment I don't know. Elijah, my favorite story in the Bible.
I usually in my brain like stop the story after the triumph of it all. But when he's done, he gives up. He's like, I can't go on. The Bible says, but he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness and came and sat down under a broom tree. This is actually the most triumphant, amazing man that's ever happened. And he asked that he might die, saying, It is enough now, O Lord.
Take away my life, for I am no better than my father's. This weariness is real. But God didn't let Elijah die, and God calls for us to go on, and to be content, to love God and love others. That's all we're called for in this life. So I don't know, I can ramble on forever.
I don't have any advice for Eddie. Other than to simplify to the most basic things ever. This is what happens whenever you're in trouble. Go to the basics. Okay, what's the purpose of life? To glorify God and enjoy him forever.
Do that and that's a really good start.
Mike Slater dot locals dot com. Transcriptor commercial free on Transcriptor commercial free on the website. Mike Slater dot locals dot com.
