From now until I'm forty-six.

I am so placed that the most power I have for good, on your average day that does not call for heroism, is:

• to raise my children to understand deeply the preferential option for the poor, to trust that God has already won the only lasting victory, and to choose kindness and good sense every day.
• to direct a stream of my own relatively substantial wealth and social safety net to people and to organizations that possess the skills and connections to use it for works of mercy.
• to exercise kindness myself, and to bear my share of the little burdens of life in order not to leave them for others to bear.
• to write and send my best thoughts out to the world.

Today will be a hard day.  It will be hard because I feel impotent.  But the reason I feel impotent is not because I cannot do the things in my power, but because the things in my power -- what Mark teasingly calls "fighting the forces of chaos and ignorance" -- seem small and confined today.

And yet, they are in my power.  It will take an effort, but the dismay and disappointment I feel, plus a little coffee, I will use.  I will finish this blog post.  I will get up from the desk.  I will look at the day's schedule and I will do the things on it.  

I will make the grocery list.  Heroically.  It's one of my least favorite chores.  I will make the list as if I can defeat Trumpism with legibility and thoroughness.

I will teach my son how to carefully attend to his negative signs when solving algebra equations.  I am relatively confident that if there is more mathematical thinking in the world, it will be a blow to Trumpism.  Very well, somehow.  And if I can do it with patience, there will be more love in the world, even if only at my own kitchen table.

I will go to a music class and watch three-year-olds dance with scarves and sing songs about barnyard animals while their mothers cradle newborn babies and wave scarves with just one hand.

I will write -- oh, this will be very hard -- I will write a high school civics exam for next week.

It's what I do.  It's all I can do today.  I have faith that it is something.

Here's the blog post.  It's my best thoughts.  I have other thoughts.  Those thoughts are not "best."  You get these instead, because I'm making an effort.

Now on to the rest of it all.

 

Comments

[Joseph]

Too soon for me to make a judgement. Four years from now when I'm 87 and see what I've hopefully surevived. Have been guided by Jesus and Mary since my Baptism in 1933.

[Jamie]

Prayers and a fist bump.

[bearing]

Thanks, Jamie.