God, everything sucks now. First of all, I just bought a new pack of
underwear and they’re all too small. Every last one of them. I tried different
colors and they are all definitely tight.
Not to mention the fact that Robin
Williams is gone. Wtf? As they say in “social media.” I’m telling you, more and
more I feel like it’s time to gird our loins. The universal suffering is nearly
unbearable.
We are living next door to people
who feel so isolated and in pain that they surprise us with the way they cope. The
problem is that we don’t really know them. They live across the hall in our
apartment complex or the next lawn over and we don’t even know their name. And,
if they come toward us, we back away.
There are some basic tenets of the
Gospel and of humanity that are grossly overlooked today, the obvious being
that we are all brothers and sisters. And I think it goes beyond that. We are
for some reason scared of each other. We’re scared of reaching out and we’re
scared of what really getting to know each other might mean.
Could it be some kind of commitment
or getting close to someone who doesn’t fit our idea of “friend” or “neighbor”? For some reason I don’t exactly understand,
we’ve become afraid to reach out. We may be one of the richest countries in the
world and most technologically advanced but we suck at love your neighbor right
now.
We don’t want to get involved. We
don’t want to get too close. We’re leery of what someone might want from us. We
don’t want to be used or taken advantage of. This means we’re concerned
primarily with ourselves and how every little thing impacts us.
Yet this is not our nature. This is
not our purpose. We’re built on compassion, on the idea that everyone who lives
in our country will be welcome here. But
is that who we really are now?
Take a look at our political system
right now. We’re so concerned about what party said what on CNN last night that
we can’t even move policies forward that pertain to our own people. There are
kids in our country who go to bed hungry because our elected officials seem to
prefer what happens on television to what happens at their house.
There’s something wrong here and it’s
not the death of Robin Williams (although if his death moves people to look
closer, that’s great and I bet he’d like that). For reasons that probably have
much to do with the way we communicate these days, we’ve left each other.
Now we have to re-learn what made
us one family to begin with. It probably starts with recognizing the guy who
lives next door.
I will say now, these are trying
times my friends. Everything is an extreme. Either I see beautiful initiatives
undertaken by compassionate young people or I see crazy people telling me why they
should control the activities that go on in my bedroom. There’s not a whole lot
of middle ground right now.
That whole gird your loins thing
comes back to me. Be vigilant. Be brave. Be yourself and be unafraid to touch
your neighbor and to love your neighbor. You don’t know what he goes through
all day and you don’t know what he dreams of at night.
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