How Do We Turn Worry and Resignation Into Caring Enough to Change?
When issues are immeasurably large and my daily life is what’s real to me, what do I dare worry, or care, about?
Friday afternoon my husband and I drove twenty minutes down the Mississippi River from Dubuque to Bellevue, enjoying the early fall beauty of the bluffs. After indulging in a dark chocolate ice cream cone we wandered up the main street. I noticed a woman sitting in a chair in the street—well, at the edge of the street. “What’s this about?” I wondered, until I spotted other people standing across the street. “There must be a parade coming,” I thought. I love parades! I asked the woman what time it would start. “Shortly,” she said.
Friday night The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to secure and destroy Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile.
That phone call took place Friday afternoon, about the time we were cheering on young people we didn’t know marching in a parade in Bellevue. We and they may have had more to cheer than any of us knew at that moment. Potential for the future, for all the world’s youth.
A week earlier my husband and I drove about twenty minutes north from Dubuque, this time into Wisconsin. We entered a store and commended the shop keeper for her “No guns allowed on the premises” sign on the door. I asked what reactions she had received and she replied that some people never noticed and some people laughed. Laughed? Saddened, I reiterated my appreciation and told her of our fledgling Culture of Nonviolence Coalition in Dubuque. The next day in Dubuque I told a shop keeper about the sign and asked if she had considered one. She said, “It wouldn’t do any good. Gun laws won’t change in my lifetime.”
Resignation rather than daring to care and caring enough to change. Government shut downs, global warming, mass shootings. This is the new normal. President Obama, speaking at the memorial after the Naval Yard mass shootings: “I fear there’s a creeping resignation. That these tragedies are just somehow the way it is. That this is somehow the new normal.”
The disconnect between the personal and communal, between the local and global leaves us sitting in the street alone. We are the government. We are the human beings called to be stewards of the environment. In our lifetime, we can change things. We are actors in our own drama, participants in our neighbor’s parade.
Clearly, we care. The question is do we care enough. I think we do. I think those middle school student council members riding in the Homecoming parade do. How can we help them and all of us really be “we the people,” that no one can shut down?
Reflect on this Sunday’s appointed texts: Psalm 146; 1 Timothy 6:6-19; Luke 16:19-31