What Restaurant Names And Grocery Carts Have To Do With ‘Spiritual Aridity’

Candace OwensDecember 7, 2022

What is your weird pet peeve? What is something minor that annoys you to no end?

They often seem silly to others, but sometimes these “pet peeves” can highlight real problems in society.

At least that’s the case with mine — poor restaurant names — as well as Daily Wire host Matt Walsh’s pet peeve of people who don’t put away their grocery carts.

Let’s start with Walsh’s frustration with people who go to the grocery store and then just leave their carts out in the parking lot. It doesn’t take much effort to do so, but some people are just lazy and selfish — they can’t even bother to walk 20 feet to the cart corral. They have no regard for other shoppers.

As Walsh says, “I truly believe that the entirety of a person’s character can be assessed based on what they do with their shopping carts after they’ve unloaded their groceries.”

His full explanation can be seen here:

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It’s hilarious, but he is correct: You can assess somebody’s character by these little mundane things that they do throughout their day.

Well, here’s my pet peeve.

Every single time I pass a particular restaurant here in the Nashville area, I fly into a rage. Why? Because its name is “Tacos 4 Life.”

What is that? “Tacos 4 Life?” Why is it called that?

I get super angry every time I see it. My husband asks me, “Are you OK?” because he can tell it’s bothering me.

And I say, “No, actually, I’m not OK. I just think they could have named the restaurant anything else. “Tacos 4 Life” is so childish. It’s something you expect to see on the back door of a high school bathroom stall.”

This happens all over the world with stupid restaurant names, but there’s something about that name that is so childish. It drives me insane. Yet across all industries, people are naming their products or business with made-up names that sound like something you would see on TikTok.

So, the other day I realized you can draw a direct line between Walsh’s annoyance with the grocery carts and my frustration with restaurant names.

That connection occurred to me while I was finishing up a book titled, “Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith,” by Bishop Robert Barron.

Bishop Barron has a couple of tremendous quotes I want to share. These words help illuminate what’s wrong with America today.

The first quote is, “If God is a great gathering force, then sin is a scattering power.”

So, jumping off that, what happens with errant grocery carts or juvenile business names? Well, we’re really scattering both the cart as well as language respectively. Throughout the English-speaking world, we have abused language. On social media especially, language is mutilated and thrown around carelessly. It seems nobody has time for proper English.

Our country is filled with people who speak in colloquialisms. We have professors who say the rules of grammar are racist and that we shouldn’t expect black students to follow them. It drives me up the wall. I like complete sentences. I like complete words — so don’t put a number four in the middle of your restaurant name.

The second quote says, “In the elegant formulation of Saint Augustine, we have turned from the Creator to creatures, and as a result, we are wandering in the land of unlikeness, which is to say, a place of spiritual aridity.”

Again: We have turned from the Creator to creatures.

Don’t you see it all over our society? Something that was a creation — which is to say something that was full and whole — has now become sad or scattered. It has become a sin, it is something that has now become a creature.

And that is what is actually driving Walsh crazy at the grocery store. That is what sends me into a mini-rage.

We are all wandering creatures, suffering from this ubiquitous spiritual aridity.

Many people are just not whole anymore.

To further my point, I want to impress upon you the definition of the word ‘Arid’: lacking interest or feeling; lifeless and dull. Another definition is: exhausted of moisture; parched; dry; barren.

That’s what I see when I look around me, people who cannot speak in complete sentences. We see this same dullness and lifelessness in music, entertainment, and modern art as well.

So, since we’re lacking this wholeness and this fullness in our culture — we are now starting to embody it on the inside.

We are walking around like creatures who know that there is something missing.

So, I guess what I’m trying to say is, please, if you ever have a restaurant, give it a proper name. And if you’re at the grocery store, just put the cart back.