Of all the things I’ve seen and heard since March 2020, for me this tweet successfully captures the anger, hostility, futility, stupidity and ridiculousness of the last two years. Nothing has ever been able to get me from zero to a billion in faster time.
And where do all those emotions leave us, and me in particular? Families are divided. Friendships are broken. Athletes are kneeling at the Olympics while representing their country. Some businesses have never been better (and worse for society) while others are broken, their doors closed with graffiti on the windows. Vaccinated vs. unvaccinated. Work from homers vs. office dwellers. Republicans vs. Democrats. Citizens vs. Government. It’s a mess, so where do we go from here?
My sister and I spoke for the first time in 3 months on Sunday. COVID has been hard on that relationship, in particular. I’m sure you all have a similar story. During that conversation, she said something that I haven’t been able to shake, a Dane Cook “Brain Ninja” move so to speak. She said “we need to be able to forgive each other” and she wasn’t talking about her and I. She was talking about the world. I think she’s right.
I re-read that tweet from Justin Trudeau and I want five minutes in an alley with him. I think about the administrators at schools who didn’t put the students first. I think about the Governor’s who said one thing and did another (Newsom’s mea culpa about his Dirty Laundry party is the poster child for this). I think about the state of the economy and the cause. The point? I could make pages and pages of lists. But doing so is not particularly helpful. And it’s not particularly forgiving and if we want to prevent the West from collapsing into Rome, we need to forgive. While I’m not there yet, I’m working on it.
In the meantime, every time I get the urge to be angry, I am going to try to look at this picture.
It’s a simple picture. One from a country I once loved and for the past few years have actively been so mad at to have wanted to renounce that half of my dual citizenship. To me, the picture reminds me of what it’s like to see coming together for a common cause, started from The most unusual of places (truckers of all people!) Forgetting and forgiving past differences and slights, and coming together to celebrate what we can be again.
Dang that was good.
from the idiots tweet, would we expect any different really?