I grew up in a quaint little town somewhere in the swamps of Jersey. There’s a Facebook group dedicated to that town. There was recently a lengthy thread there bemoaning the ugly changes that have come to that town.

There’s nothing unique about this. I live in Aurora, Colorado, just outside Denver. Neither Denver nor the surrounding areas are in many ways what they were in 1995 when I moved here. (And, no, Venezuelan gangs have NOT taken us over, just 3 or 4 crappy apartment buildings in a city of 400,000.) The same goes for almost all big cities, which is why so many people are finding places like Huntsville, Boise, and Springfield, Missouri so appealing.

It’s as if there was some optimal Baby Bear point in the past when things were juuuuust right and history somehow had a duty to stop right there. That’s not how it works.

Now consider the following:

• King Solomon never had a flush toilet.
• Cornelius Vanderbilt never rode in a car.
• John D. Rockefeller was never on the internet.
• No slave owner ever had a lightbulb or telephone.

Today, people we consider poor have all these things. I remember a year or so ago watching a march in downtown Chicago led by none other than Thuuuh Reverennnd Jacksonnnn where people were chanting: “The only solution is Communist Revolution!” And they were recording it on their smartphones. They ain’t gonna have no smartphones when they are eating bugs and tree bark.

We have more technology literally at our fingertips than ever, and we have more material abundance than any other generation ever thought imaginable. And yet we are just flat miserable. Consider the number of people on prescription head meds.

Mick Jagger couldn’t get no satisfaction because he was looking in all the wrong places. None of us are really any different.

Podcaster Steve Deace is fond of saying that every society after the Fall described in Genesis 3 has had some sort of horrendous evil in its midst. America is no exception.

What then is the answer? There is no quick fix or silver bullet. Utopia is not among our options. There are no “solutions”, only tradeoffs. And as we are 23 days out from the election, please don’t hang any hope on the outcome. What ultimately ails us is not political, but rather spiritual.  Our politics are merely a reflection of our spiritual condition.

To quote Act 5, Scene 5 of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, “It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.” King Solomon, in the book Ecclesiastes, dismissed it all as “vanity”.

An old friend who has never been a very political person recently got me thinking long and hard about the following Scripture: “If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.” (II Chronicles 7:14)

This is our only true hope for a better society. And even this is not a promise of utopia.

It’s an ongoing project, the recurring duty of every generation.