This Too Shall Pass
We are all feeling pretty glum about America right now. There are many problems and perspectives.
You may feel the whole country is racist and it needs to be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up. You may feel that radical protesters are trying to erase history. You may feel that there is endemic racism in every action by police. You know there are some bad cops, but you feel certain they’re a tiny minority. Maybe you own a small business and you’ve been closed for months and you can’t get your employees to come back to work. Maybe you’re afraid of losing your health insurance or your home.
We’ve all been through a very tough time with the pandemic, stuck in our homes for months, many of us losing our jobs, maybe permanently. It’s a scary time.
Wayne Dyer, a popular motivational speaker and author, famously said “When you change the way you look at things the things you look at change.”
I remember when president Trump was elected in 2016, my gay friends and relatives were scared to death that all the LGBTQ 🏳️🌈 progress of the last 50 years was going to be lost and the country was going to descend into a new dark age. It seemed like we were going to be in the 1950s again. Everyone who came out was going to have to go back into the closet to avoid persecution.
With all the commotion in the streets lately you may have missed a very big event that was only briefly in the news. On June 15, 2020, the Trump era Supreme Court voted in a landmark decision to extend workplace protections to cover sexual orientation and gender identity. It was a big victory for LGBTQ Americans and their allies. It was passed because The conservative justices joined the liberal justices in the pursuit of social justice.
The important point here is this; Say what you will about how messed up our country is, but you should realize that the vast majority of Americans support changes to improve the social justice of our society. Americans working for the greater good include not just people in the streets but Congress and even the Supreme Court!
If you’re not happy with the third branch of government, the Presidency, you can vote him out of office in November.
Go ahead and feel horrible about all the injustices of the last 400 years. You should also be aware that with all it’s issues, our government is still working toward the goal of liberty and justice for all. It requires a lot of work, democracy is messy. This is a work in progress but it’s moving in the right direction.
Don’t tear down the country. Our nation is a precious entity and it is fragile, don’t break it! Let the checks and balances in the Constitution work for us all.
The framers weren’t perfect, but they were light years ahead of their time in creating the first blueprint for a fair and just society.
They were brilliant, but they were also men of their times. History is just history, it’s not today, it’s not now. Don’t make perfection the enemy of the good.
There is a famous Persian adage reflecting on the temporary nature of the human condition. It was referred to by Abraham Lincoln in a speech he gave before being elected president; “And this, too, shall pass away. How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride!, how consoling in the depths of affliction!”
In other words, don’t get either too satisfied or too down. Things change. Be part of positive change for the greater good. Don’t bury the past. To make a better future we need to understand where we came from.
Build alliances, not walls OR barricades. We’re all in this together, let’s work together to make America better.
Sent from my iPhone