Recently, my posts have trended toward the darker side, with laments over our broken political discourse and inability to coalesce around common goals. That doesn’t mean I’ve lost hope, however.
Here’s why.
Mood Music:
When shit rains down in our communities, we continue to come together. That’s an old story, with such examples as people combing through rubble and tending to the injured at the WTC in the wake of 9-11 and the rescue missions immediately after Hurricane Katrina.
As Mister Rogers once recalled his mother telling him, “The helpers always come.“
I’ve seen abundant examples during the current pandemic — nurses and doctors I know personally, driving their sanity to the knife’s edge to keep patients alive regardless of their politics, food drives overflowing with donations to help people who have lost their income, success of a thousand Facebook donation drives.
At a more personal level, despite what you see daily on social media, people remain good, able to see past politics to care for people.
My late father-in-law was an inflexible, often angry Trump supporter. He was socially conservative to the core. But he loved his “liberal” family members as much as the conservative ones. And it didn’t matter what you believed or what color your skin was or what your sexual orientation was: If you were burned out of your home, in legal trouble or broken down on the side of the road, he dropped everything and did what he could to make your burden a little less crushing.
I have a cousin who I constantly spar with on Facebook over politics and what we should or shouldn’t be doing amid COVID-19. When we meet in person, we argue about none of that stuff. Instead, we share in the joy of the little kids running around us and the concern for family down on their luck.
I have a friend from the old neighborhood who is far to the right of me politically. But our shared past and relationships forged there far outweigh the squabbles of the present.
Humans can be terrible to each other. But enough of us are kind to each other to re-enforce my belief that when push comes to shove, we can still come together.
That’s why, as bad as things are right now, I think we’ll get through this. I don’t know how long it will take, but it will happen.
Great points made here. I think even when we get hatful or unhappy people around us, even though it takes effort, responding in kindness has a greater pay off. Lets try to leave people a little happier than when we met them.