When strangers tell us things we want to hear, we want to believe

By David McElroy · April 13, 2019

I’m having a late lunch at a McDonald’s near my house. There aren’t many people in here at this time of the afternoon. I noticed a woman come in and head to the restroom near me. She was talking on her iPhone, so I didn’t pay much attention to her.

As she left the restroom and walked near my table, she asked the person on the phone to hold on. She walked right up to my table and I started wondering whether I knew her and she was coming to talk to me. But she stooped right next to my table — about 18 inches from my feet — and picked up a penny from the floor.

“You have an angel thinking about you,” she said as she extended her hand with the penny.

I smiled and gave a friendly little laugh as I said, “Thank you.”

“I’m serious,” she said. “I felt it as I walked past you and this is confirmation. You need an angel today and she’s thinking about you.”

And with that, she went back to her phone conversation and went to the counter to order.

As far as I know, I’ve never met the woman. She was Hispanic, well-dressed, well-spoken and seemed to be about 45 years old.

I wondered whether there was some superstition about pennies and angels, so I did a quick search and discovered several instances of people writing about such things.

“They say when an angel misses you, they toss a penny down from heaven,” one writer said. “Sadly, not everyone knows how much truth there is in this old adage.”

Another said it’s a sign from an angel that a loved one is thinking about you. Some of the writers were religious. Some claimed it was a psychic or spiritual idea from some other perspective. There seem to be several variations of the superstition.

It sounds just as silly as any other superstition. I don’t toss horseshoes over my shoulder. I step on cracks and walk under ladders. They all seem like silliness or metaphors to me.

But here’s the thing. When this woman told me that, I wanted to believe her. So the interesting thing here isn’t the penny or the woman or any angel or a loved one. The interesting thing is that my heart wanted to believe.

I have a feeling this is how a lot of superstitions spread. People made dubious associations between events — a crow passing overhead, followed by someone’s death, maybe — and then jumped to conclusions about what signs meant. Then they repeated their conclusions — and others believed the things which they wanted to believe or maybe the things which scared them. And the superstitions spread.

Today hasn’t been a good day for me. There’s nothing specific that happened, but I’ve been dealing with acceptance of something I haven’t wanted to accept. It has me down.

So when this woman told me an angel is thinking about me today, I wanted to believe that. I wanted to believe someone has me on her mind. (I think of angels as female, for some reason.) I have no rational reason to want to feel this way, but it’s somehow comforting. Just like Fox Mulder in a different context, I want to believe.

As I was finishing this, the woman who found the penny and started this came back to my table. She’s apparently been eating and she’s leaving now.

“God is sending you a miracle,” she said. “You need to save that penny. When your angel tells you why you’re on her mind, that penny will remind you of what happened. Trust me.”

It sounds crazy. It’s just silly superstition. I know that.

But I want to believe.

I’ll keep the penny — just in case.

Share on Social Networks

Most adults are so busy trying to force little children to act like miniature adults that they don’t allow kids the healthy development they need. Researcher Erika Christakis says this is because most adults don’t seem to understand the importance of being little. Christakis is a former faculty member of the Yale Child Study Center, and she says today’s parents are so eager to “invest in the future” for their children that they completely lose sight of the fact that being “little” — and doing child-like things — will give their children better outcomes than their “adultification” of childhood. Children desperately need more unstructured play and more unstructured time in general with adults who are willing to allow them to be little investigators rather than sponges for stuffing with dry facts. The very things which most affluent parents believe are helping their children get ahead are setting them up for failure instead.

What if your daughter were about to start kindergarten and you went to the affluent school where she was about to go and discovered that the school was teaching nonsense? That’s exactly what happened to an education consultant in Colorado who recently visited his daughter’s new school. Everybody was nice, but when the kindergarten teacher talked about their methods of teaching reading, he cringed. She was using “progressive” methods that were debunked decades ago. He’s learning that most schools use similar techniques that don’t work, simply because schools of education are committed to ideas and techniques based on ideology instead of cognitive science. So why do so many people entrust their children’s future to these well-meaning but incompetent people? It’s one of the most underreported scandals of modern learning. Read his summary of what he’s found here and then check out the radio documentary to which he refers where you can find out more.

I really enjoy political satire. You might remember that my first short film was political satire. But there’s a trend in political satire today which I find disturbing — and this graphic is a great example. This fake promotional ad for Fox News was placed on New York City subways recently. When I found it on social media, people who lean to the political left were smirking and enjoying this attack on their “stupid” opponents. But this isn’t satire. It’s just a mean-spirited attempt to say, “Those who agree with me are smarter than you idiots who watch Fox News.” It’s a smirking, nasty attack which makes no point other than to claim superiority over people for the sin of disagreeing. I absolutely loathe Fox News, but I also loathe CNN and MSNBC and all the other media outfits who pander to partisans and intentionally try to divide people. If you want to show that you’re a small-minded bigot who doesn’t understand his opponents, just pretend your enemies are all stupid and evil. They’re not. The truth is a lot more complicated. Ideas are ripe for satire, but that involves creative thinking, not just nasty personal attacks.

When I have a bad day, my first reaction is to want to turn to someone I love. But my next instinct is a paradox. If I can’t call someone and I can’t touch someone and I can’t be with someone who loves me, I have an overwhelming desire to be alone. Tuesday was an unpleasant day. I had to argue with my bank about something. (I won, but still.) Something happened at work that made me want to walk out and never return, although I understand that nobody else involved would understand. Tonight, someone on Facebook who I barely knew reacted badly to something I said — for reasons I’m completely baffled about — and called me a “jackass” and unfriended me. I’d like to talk with someone I love. I’d like to spend time with a loved one and feel safe and understood. But since I can’t do that, I crave the opposite. I want to find a cabin somewhere and disappear for a month. We humans are social creatures. We need each other. But there are days when others cause enough hurt that a few weeks of silence would be a relief. This has been one of those days.

Democracy is going to die — and it’s all because the human brain prefers easy answers to complex problems. You and I were born during the golden age of democracy. It was a period during which it was assumed that democracy was the natural evolution of civic governance. But Dr. Shawn W. Rosenberg is challenging that idea. He’s a leader in the study of political psychology and he says research convinces him that the human brain isn’t wired for self-rule and that democracy is heading toward collapse. In a paper presented this year to the International Society of Political Psychologists, Rosenberg argues that the human brain naturally favors simple answers to complex problems, which tends to favor the rise of authoritarian strongmen who offer confident and simplistic solutions. Anyone who’s paying attention sees this happening around the world already. Donald Trump isn’t the cause of the problem, but he is an early example of this outcome in action. All authoritarian rulers come to power offering simplistic solutions — just as Adolph Hitler did in Germany and Benito Mussolini did in Italy. I’ve argued for 20 years that this country is heading toward social and economic collapse and I’ve made the case that things are going to get ugly when that happens, at least for those who are not prepared. Many people will ignore this evidence, of course, because they have too much emotionally invested in the idea that democracy will prevail — but that is just another example of clinging to a simple answer to a very complex problem. Don’t be surprised when things get ugly.

Related Posts