It’s Past Time to Do the Hard Work

I was channel surfing yesterday evening looking for anything remotely positive and stumbled on world traveler Rick Steves’ program on PBS. 

He was in Nazaré, Portugal and the scenes were magnificent. Calm, blue sea. Families with children playing on the beach. Quiet little villages of happy people walking the streets and working in open markets. 

It all seemed so far from the real chaos in the world with the now labeled COVID-19 virus sweeping the globe, political upheaval across Europe, the impossible-to-describe calamity in Syria, the wretched corruption and cruelty of Netanyahu in the Middle East, and of course the alarming disintegration of our own election process and the shameful division and rancor of our people. 

I long for summer and a beach getaway. There is something transfixing and transformative about the ocean. 

And yet I cannot stop thinking about those who have no way to escape; the oppressed; those tortured by chronic illness and disease; the orphaned children of these immoral wars; the old dying alone; the victims of sexual abuse, many of them children; those being relentlessly hurt by the odious vicious prejudice and hate still thriving in America; those stuck in menial jobs unable to advance or be paid a decent wage and unable to provide for their families. I think of those countless souls along our southern border, caught in a cruel bureaucracy of political games. Fending off criminals and cons and struggling in the elements to protect their small children. 

There is hard work to do in this country and across the world. We don’t have time for the nonsense of political sports, these inessential divisions impairing us, the degrading tactics of our President and the shabby, ineffective responses of those who oppose him. 

Can we not at least try to be noble in our thoughts and actions? Can we endeavor to make endless attempts to end the demand that we all be alike and give ourselves the freedom to use all of our talents and passions to be good Americans?

We need hard tenderness. One of heart, but also comprehension. One of courage, and conscience. One of compassion, but steel will.

Paraphrasing the poet Anna Akhmatova, "we need a tenderness that is not quiet, but one that rings out, like the first waterfall, that crunches like the crust of blue ice, that prays with a swanlike voice and can break down in tears before our eyes."

We have so much work to do that requires just such a strong warmth and sympathy. 

I want to live in a nation that inspires that. One that gets the hard, human work done. Don’t you?

(c) 2020 Timothy Moody