Utagawa Hiroshige 歌川 広重
Twilight Moon at Ryōgoku Bridge
(Not Dated)

"May we soon live in OrdinaryTimes again, Amen!"

Prosperity thrives during OrdinaryTimes. The Ecumenical Calendar divides each year into ferial and festal times, Ordinary days and designated extraordinary ones. It seems sometimes, especially to naive Americans traveling in Italy, that every blessed day has in some way been designated extraordinary on their calender, especially when you were expecting to find a bank or post office open for business only to find it’s the Feast Day of Saint Someoneorother, so whatever service you thought you needed would be unavailable until the following Monday, assuming, often wrongly, that that following Monday isn’t also designated a Day of Holy Obligation to Saint Somebodyelse. Regular life thrives on ordinary days, and, outside of Italy proper, celebrates infrequently. Imagine the difficulty of holding down a regular job while decked out every day in the appropriate garb for properly acknowledging the influence and holiness of good old Saint Martyrdom. Christmas occurs just once each year for good reasons.

When I began this Prosperity Series, I asked myself where Prosperity had suddenly gone, because it seemed to me to have gone missing. Prosperity’s steaming carcass might have been cowering behind the daily fanfare our incumbent threw up on the new and even larger than ever before social media Big Screen from his first day in office. It was as if every day was suddenly somehow extraordinary and in need of celebratory acknowledgment, though rather than celebrating the acts of long-dead saints, we seemed to be encouraged, for some indecipherable reason, to celebrate stupidity at levels never before witnessed or imagined. These displays elbowed Prosperity out of its uber-ordinary spotlight, which cast neither glare nor much in the way of shadow, and replaced it with Klieg lights intended to spotlight performing seals. Prosperity proved incapable of generating sufficient disbelief to swallow whatever took over the stage. Indeed, Prosperity had never seriously considered itself an actor or that it might even try to entertain anyone else, for it had always gratefully inhabited OrdinaryTimes.

Prosperity seems necessarily unassuming. It doesn’t seek notoriety, nor does it thrive under spotlights. It’s rather shy by nature, and the very soul of unassuming. While just before our clown car incumbent was sworn into office, the very first President to employ profanity in his acceptance speech, if only for shock value, our economy had been quietly humming along at a record-setting pace, the very envy of every other nation in the world. The moment that flim-flam man was named President, our Prosperity began shrinking, probably out of embarrassment. Any decent Prosperity certainly would have, and Prosperities, as a class, tend to be the very soul of decency incarnate. It would have been unthinkably incongruent for Prosperity to have joined in such a celebratory party, especially when paid for with borrowed and stolen money, the property, not of the spendthrift incumbent or his party, but of a quietly Prosperous people, who never once sought a spotlight on any of their actions, however lauditory or decent. It would have been obscene for Prosperity to have played even a bit part in that newly unveiled production.

A friend told me that only about 2% of the US Population qualifies as rich. The criteria are straightforward: a steady high income exceeding half a million per annum, property, or an inheritance qualified most. Few earned their wealth in what Prosperity might consider to be the old-fashioned way, by diligently saving their pennies. The mathematics don’t quite work out, so the vast majority of the Prosperous will never be rich, but they won’t require great wealth if they can manage to thrive in OrdinaryTimes. If they acquire tastes far outside their station, insisting upon private travel or extravagance, they enter Extraordinary Times and must leave their Prosperity, however hard won, behind. Once inhabiting Extraordinary Times, the gravity seems to work differently. Speculation becomes favored over thrift. Grift becomes just another necessary part of engaging in business. Tax cuts become a genuine obsession because generational wealth becomes the purpose of existence, rather than a relatively serene Prosperity, which never fixates on inheritances.

The fact of the matter might be that we’re actually fated to live in OrdinaryTimes, however much we might wish that every damned day was Christmas. The shine too quickly wears off any celebration carried to any level close to compulsion. Respiration requires more than merely deep inhalations. We exhale to create potential, to rest, and to refresh ourselves. We dare not expect every transaction to become the deal of any century, lest we spoil the possibilities for genuine satisfaction. The all-or-nothing focus reliably produces nothings rather than alls, and the need to live as if you were a Midas on steroids pretty much smothers any possibility of actually living. In lieu of living, we see our incumbent (hey, we elected it!) constantly on the move. He thinks nothing of hopping a huge airliner and flying up to Bedminster for breakfast, then down to Florida for lunch, then back to the freshly gilded once-White House, now casting a curiously envious yellow glow. Who knows where or whether he ever goes to bed? He lives his extraordinary days as if he were the vampire he seems to be, obsessed with finding fresh blood to infect, while Prosperity, that old reliable partner (but never once in crime), cowers in the wings of a theater where a play she never wished to take part in takes another sorry curtain call. May we soon live in OrdinaryTimes again, Amen!

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Prosperity, #PureSchmaltz