Utagawa Hiroshige 歌川 広重
A Lion Training a Cub
(c. 1832/34)

"…the first sweet or savory taste of a Prosperity finally emerging."

As The Muse and I prepared to attend the long-awaited Amazon Web Services Open House, a fresh anti-data center Reel appeared in my Facebook feed. I have been observing the opposition making public fools of themselves since they started protesting. They have performed every derivative activity with which generations of protestors before them had undermined their arguments. They misrepresented with the usual vengeance. They seemed to love to take information out of context, as if the state with the oldest and most mature environmental agency in the country could be equated to states with numbingly more primitive permitting standards and practices. Washington ain’t Virginia. They also characterized Amazon Web Services, arguably among the most environmentally engaged corporations on the planet, with data to prove it, as inveterate liars. Their message to not trust Amazon came across as “Don’t Trust Us,” instead. The latest message seemed to properly encapsulate their entire campaign. It said that they were going to attend the open house, but not go inside, and ask hard questions, but the spokesperson promised not to believe a word they received in response.

Their campaign came into full focus in that instant, or a few moments later, after I’d recovered from my stunned silence. Committed to attending the open house, but not going inside, to ask hard questions but not Believing a word they might receive in response. Had the spokesperson plugged both ears and started loudly humming, he couldn’t have made his intent clearer. He actually didn’t need to do the plugging-his-ears thing. His message was clear: there would be no Believing from the protestors at that open house, which he’d committed to not entering. A small sea of skeptics surrounded a pop-up tent on the periphery of the high school where the open house was held. They were impotently screaming something I couldn’t quite make out as I found a parking place and wheeled the wheelchair-bound Muse inside. A candidate for Sheriff met us at the bottom of the ramp and escorted us inside more out of friendship than for protection. The non-Belivers seemed innocent enough, and purposefully impotent in that moment.

Once inside, I was confronted with pretty much the opposite of unbelieving. Clearly, Amazon has spared little expense in producing full-color brochures extolling all the usual and customary virtues. Experts, those actually in charge of the various elements of the data center development and operation, were standing at stations spread around the school’s large lobby. They were the most reassuring part of the production. These were typically young professionals, each responsible for some component of the proposed development: Water, Power, Construction, Community, Etc. Each testified as only a true believer can, from knowledgeable conviction. One of them, under The Muse’s cross-examination, when she confessed that she had thoroughly vetted AWS before voting to sell them the property to build the data center on, the AWS employee echoed her point, reporting that he’d researched to find the best in the business, and chose AWS because he wanted to work for the best. Both the Muse and that AWS representative demonstrated the effect well-supported Believing can have. The protestors who had come inside, which, later, even included that young man who’d sworn he wouldn’t come inside, seemed to shuffle dispiritedly around the periphery, for they insisted on finding nothing to believe in there. They moved like soulless black holes around the spectacle, seemingly working way too hard not to believe anything they heard.

Prosperity seems to depend upon Believing. Believing seems at least necessary, if probably not sufficient all by itself to produce Prosperity. It must be a precursor, though, for what else could possibly anchor anything so damnably unlikely? I reported yesterday that nobody seems to be just born into Prosperity, that it takes some sort of Initiation in order for its force to take over. Nor does it seem to merely spring spontaneously like something that might happen to Saul on the road to Damascus. It seems more deliberate and demands more conviction than any mere accident might. Some intent seems necessary, though, again, rarely sufficient. If I were the sort to prescribe a tactic to at least usefully increase the potential for Prosperity emerging, I would be forced to suggest Believing as that necessary element. Those who demand premature facts tend to disrupt this strangest of all strange attractors. Believing seems to work like some sort of tractor beam, guiding Prosperity into where it might usefully root and flower. Those who’ve chosen not to believe seem to be denying themselves the necessary invitation. Nobody enters without receiving this sort of invitation beforehand.

Was Amazon selling me soap? You’d better believe they were, for why else even engage in such an exercise? A County Commissioner and his Development Director had both requested some support in countering the disbelieving narrative, which seemed potentially very destructive. Public opinion isn’t evidence or proof, but it’s also not nothing when a significant public policy decision’s impending. If the unbelievers had their way, an historic opportunity, a less than once in a generation one, might be forced to pass us by. This would not have created a more-of-the-same status quo, but accelerated what had until recently been a long and inexorably slow slide. Unbelieving would have amplified into certainty a worse-than-worst-case scenario that could have cursed us for generations, much as the unbelievers had wrongly cautioned approving the Believing would have done.

I saw many who seemed to believe that they were the protectors of an environment of which they exhibited no particular understanding. They spoke of wasting water in a context where the benefactor had a demonstrated capability and commitment to be water positive by the start of the next decade. They’d already done it in a neighboring county. Nonbelieving seems absolute while Believing seems more relative. The Believer doesn’t seem to require that the target of their belief necessarily manifest just as imagined. They receive much benefit, psychic income, from the energy emanating from the simple act of Believing. When Believing, their dream coming true has very little to do with it manifesting precisely as imagined, for Believing works like priming a pump, a necessary element of eventually siphoning water, but never wholly sufficient. Ten thousand unimagined influences will properly color any eventual manifestation. Believing’s just the first act in a much longer-lived Prosperity, but engaging in it might deliver the first sweet or savory taste of a Prosperity finally emerging.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Prosperity, #PureSchmaltz