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Writing about what I have been reading and encountering in the media. |
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WELCOME TO MY BLOG! I comment on things I am reading, thinking about, encountering in media, and spiritual issues. I hope you will find something interesting. PS. I love feedback... |
| It is New Year’s Eve, 2022. Written this way, the evening belongs to the New Year and to the old year at the same time in the same way the word “and” belongs to the beginning of the sentence and the end of the sentence at the same time. Today serves to tie time together into a continuous thread. I do not know if I like that. This year, 2022, has been full, full, full of challenges I never imagined possible. They were not new to 2022 as they all started in previous years. For example, the right wing of the Republican party, which was once the right wing of the Democratic Party, has its roots tangled in the roots of feudalism which is the root of slavery. I don’t know if it is growing directly from a root, from a stump or from a seed, but it is most certainly growing and will branch enthusiastically into 2023. Then there is pandemic. The Bible tells us Jesus said the poor will always be with us. He could have just as easily said the sick we will always have with us. People go a little crazy during pandemics. If you read the history of the bubonic plague, you will encounter an astonishing amount of craziness. Of course, they really didn’t know what was causing it or how to stop it. But look just 104 years ago and you can read about the flu pandemic. People did know how it was spread and how to protect oneself and one’s neighbors by wearing masks. The same thing happened then as happened now: the craziness was expressed as anti-masking. Of course, the anti-maskers thought the maskers were crazy, too. Look at the politics of Trumpism. So many of us have been comfortable with our democratic ways of doing things it was unimaginable there could be a coup here in the USA. But we watched it on TV. Then we had to talk about what we saw, a lot, in order to decide if it was really a coup. Some people still think it was just a normal demonstration. Who would have thought we could see that with our own eyes and still disagree about what we saw? In fact, we have seen it over and over and over and we still can’t agree. As I see it we are lucky that democracy doesn’t require total agreement. It simply requires enough agreement that plans can be made to deal with consequences and reduce vulnerability to such things in the future. Of course, those who disagree will continue to dramatize how much they are suffering and to work at drawing more people to their perspective. This is sometimes unpleasant and unwelcome and sometimes, I find myself in that minority. There are many things in the burden we carry forward over which we feel little or no control like the war in Ukraine, our deliberate helplessness over guns, and looming extinctions and weather events related to global warming that come now, no matter what we do about the problem in the future. This is just to say, we carry an enormous burden of unresolved issues from this year to the next. We use language to do so by saying Happy New Year! on both sides of the moment the ball drops. However, at that moment, we let language hold it all while we dance, laugh, cry, or sleep across the divide between 2022 and 2023. May your moment of transition be unburdened as you celebrate or sleep the night away and may you all find yourselves ready and willing to greet the challenges of the New Year with optimism and creativity. |
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