Hope

We are almost through the holidays and I can't help but notice a subtle shift in the attitudes of the people I have encountered while racing around town.  While hunting for a table in an overstuffed food court, a stranger gladly let me hover over them while they finished the last of their Orange Julius (liquid gold!)  So I could grab their table when they got up.  I offered them a happy holidays and got a smile back, a real smile!  Not the "Oh no a strange has just spoken to me...RUN!" smile I usually get in these situations.  A man seeing that I was with a hungry little one let me get ahead of him in line, so I bought his coffee.  Perhaps it is just wishful thinking, maybe it is.  But it seems to me the recent violence in our country and its resulting heartbreak have reminded some of the entreaty of the season... "Good will toward man"  I'm also reminded of something I recently read 

“The world is indeed full of peril and in it there are many dark places.
But still there is much that is fair. And though in all lands, love is now
mingled with grief, it still grows, perhaps, the greater.” 
― J.R.R. Tolkien,

It was only a matter of time before a Tolkien quote made it into my blog.  Better to get it over with sooner rather than later.

Night Night.

Punditry

Our hearts are broken tonight and the punditry will begin.  My voice is only one of millions.   Yet it is mine and I have to speak.  And here is what I think...

We have a rot at the very core of our culture.  It goes beyond gun control, beyond liberal ,beyond conservative, beyond constitutions, and beyond 2nd amendments.  Simply put, we are a society that has lost empathy and are in love with violence.  We have stopped seeing our fellow human beings as just that; our fellow human begins.  Look at how we speak about each other.   “they” are conservatives!  “they” are liberals! “they” are homosexual! “they” are evangelical!  “they” are atheists!  “they” are aliens!  “they” are taking our jobs and “they” are evil and “they” are the other and we hate them for it.  In reality, we are fellow human souls sharing our time together on this fragile little planet.  But we can barely look our neighbor in the eye on an elevator or check out line.

In the immediate face of tragedy, we wake up from our carefully guarded isolation.  We give to telethons, give up our cans of soup and blankets.   We send them prayers (do we really do that?)  Then we segregate ourselves again and scream at each other in traffic and think “i hate people!”   

We love violence, we lack empathy and we are armed.  This cannot end well.  

That is what my broken heart and lone voice has to say tonight.