Hi team.
There’s a lot. So much. Too much.
Fiberglass in saline. Foods that aren’t safe: rice, blueberries,salad, who knows.
Gun violence, police violence, ICE.
Strange fruit.
Bullies in office, angels dying.
It’s a lot.
They say when Rome collapsed there was no announcement— the roads and bridges just stopped getting fixed.
Despair can pull with gravitational force. And sometimes I just sit on the kitchen floor wishing I wasn’t so good at pattern recognition.
This is when I’d like to shift into some type of solution and benediction. A step by step guide of redemption. Mutual aid and safe sources.
But I don’t know any of that.
What I know is this: the past two years have been detrimental. So many people are suffering. But enough folks are doing “Okay-enough” to not want to rock the boat.
But we are in a tempest. The boat is going to rock.
All I can offer is this: we have lived in an anomaly of a time. Relatively free from disease (polio, measles, whooping cough) (until these MFers brought it all back); clean air and water (well mostly, until recently). Public education (yeah, again, it used to be solid).
We grew up in a world so protected we forgot there was danger.
And now— we see it. Unfortunately we had to wait until safeguards were deregulated and removed before we recognized how important and beneficial they were.
And maybe we’ll never get back to where we were. Toothpaste doesn’t go back in the tube. There’s no “control Z” for this.
But what we CAN do is recognize what we had, before we burned it down for clicks.
We can remember that most teachers are givers. That it isn’t parents vs teachers, we’re a team.
We can bring nuance back: differentiate between Tech Giants and scientists.
We can forsake the giants who left us to rot.
And above all we can be gentler with each other.
I instinctively smiled at a woman at a stop light and she fully THANKED ME.
People are starving for kindness and connection. And that is something we CAN do.
It doesn’t take much. Let someone merge. Offer someone a snack. Make a fresh pot of coffee at work.
A co-worker washed up my dishes after lunch and I almost cried because it was an unnecessary kindness. Needlessly helpful.
So maybe we can be a little more Dolly and a lot less Donny.
A little bit of kindness goes a long way. Especially when everything is crumbling.
May you know that you belong to the cosmos. That we are hurtling through space on a floating rock. May the sun shine upon you, this day and everyday.
Eat something. You are loved by me and others.
NOT. ALONE.
Pretty Good Ugly 