And Yet, Here We Are

April 5, 2022

Beloved:
     If you want to test someone’s love for you, invite yourself to their spring break trip to Washington DC and then fracture your ankle nine weeks before they leave.  If they still want you to come along, they might love you.  If they spend the whole week wheeling your luggage, fetching your coffee, loading and unloading your walker from planes, cars, and buses, and inching down sidewalks and through museums to keep pace with your hobbling self . . . then, let me tell ya, they definitely love you.  Being with my sister Cathy and her wife, Lisa, was loads of fun for me (and hopefully for them).  I always love DC, partly because history and politics are so interesting to me and partly because I find it to be an easy city in which to get around, even when I’m crippled.

     Every time I’m in the city, visiting museums to learn more on the subjects I care most about, I am once more overwhelmed by the horror human beings commit against each other.  I come away wondering how it’s possible we carry on with normal life as if the horror hasn’t happened, with the sensation we ought to be paying full attention to these memories, these realities, to them and only them, until we establish once and for all, no such horrors can be allowed to happen anywhere ever again.  To leave the Holocaust Memorial* and stand once more on the city street, watching ordinary traffic on an ordinary day, seems positively wrong.  Wrong in every way.  And yet, here we are.

     I still can’t get my head and heart around the reality of another war of annexation in Europe, right now in 2022.  In the same spring our capital hosts a cherry blossom kite festival, another is documenting war crimes ~ murderous crimes carried out shamelessly in the light of day, videoed and posted for everyone with eyes to see.  Again, in 2022 Europe.  Making it our turn.  Our time to choose what we will do, in practically the exact circumstances as our grand-parents, except we have better information, and in real time.  What we thought they should have done is now ours to do, to get right, whatever courage and faith and grace such circumstances demand.  I can’t say I know for sure, beyond the three commands I take to heart daily:  kindness, justice and humility.  They are hardly passive words.  They are the words of big love for hard times.  May all of us be found faithful.
​
* or the Museum of African American History & Culture, or the Museum of Native American History, or the exhibit of American War in the Museum of American History