My Heart Aches Tonight

This evening, as I was coming back from a walk, I stopped to say hi to a neighbor and we talked about what was going on in our country right now. She pointed down to her 5-year-old daughter and said that she’s asking questions and how do you explain this to a young child? As I walked away, I said, “I have to go home and cry now,” and we both gave a small, sad laugh.

And my heart aches tonight. 

It aches for the families of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor and so many that came before them.

It aches for people of color who have been held down for too long by systems designed to hold them down and beyond which they have no real power.

It aches for Black parents who live in a sort of fear I’ve never really known that their kids might be the next story on the news.

It aches for the Black community for their pain and anger and for feeling so unheard and unhelped for so long.

It aches for the almost 107,000 dead from Covid-19, which though it’s not gone, it is all but currently sort of, but not really, forgotten.

My heart aches tonight. 

It aches for our country, which feels like it’s falling apart as we stand by wringing our hands in horror because no one in Washington has the courage (or maybe desire) to throw water on the Wicked Witch of the West by standing up to the man who could have chosen to lead our country with compassion and strength and worked to unite us, but instead chose the exact opposite, using loaded, incendiary language designed to hurt and divide.

It aches for the US Constitution, particularly the First Amendment, which protects people’s right to protest peacefully, while some were fired on by tear gas as the President called himself the “ally of peaceful protestors.” 

I don’t know how a parent explains 400 years of systemic racism that ends in terrifying images on a TV screen to young children. I don’t know how to reassure my own adult children that we will see better days. Honestly? Right now, I don’t know how to reassure myself the same thing. 

What I do know is this: We have so much work to do. We have to do more than post memes and platitudes and hashtags. We have to read and learn and figure out what it means to be anti-racist. We have to speak up and help out when we see injustice happen. We have to have compassion. We have to be kind.

Where is the hope?

It’s hard to be hopeful when things really don’t feel very hopeful, isn’t it? I started writing this yesterday afternoon, before I’d seen the video of the Minneapolis police and what they did to unarmed George Floyd. We have to find a way to make this better.

I'd like to think I'm a fairly positive person. When I write, even if it’s not a happy topic, I like to end on a more positive note because that’s how I’m wired…I need to find the bright side of things. And yet, we’re in the middle of a global pandemic with no real end in sight. And we don’t know what the future holds as far as the rest of this year and school and other things that we think of as “normal.” And the man who is supposed to be leading our country is having a much better time dividing us, mocking his rivals, tweeting conspiracy theories, with little relief from his horribleness or lack of leadership in sight. And his defenders still defend him. And public health has become a political weapon; simple protective face masks weaponized in a weird new culture war. And the same people who a year ago insisted their right to bear arms at all costs was more important than our children’s right to be safe in their school now insist their right to a good time somehow supersedes yours or my right to feel safe when we leave our houses. And on and on and on. And I just don’t know how to find a hopeful note to end on when everything feels so hopeless.

I’m heartbroken for the mess we seem to be embroiled in: the vitriol spewed on social media comments by people on the extremes (and maybe not so extremes) and the awful things that are happening in the news: Covid deaths reaching over 100,000 and apparent disdain/disbelief of it, the murders of black men on video, disaster after disaster. With no end in sight for any of this ugliness, we’re like sideline players left to feel. And heal. It’s hard to find hope. Right now. But I don’t feel like all hope is lost.

Can you feel as though you’ve been sucked into a vortex of hopelessness and sadness, but not feel like you’ve lost all hope or feel sad all the time? How does that work? I think of it like this: There were some bad things that happened to me in childhood, but if you ask me, I would say (with complete honesty) that I had a happy childhood. These things aren’t mutually exclusive, are they?

What did people in other eras do when things felt this bad? Because in the history of our country, or all humankind for that matter, there have been times that have felt just as, or even more, devastatingly terrible. Young people facing angry mobs with rocks and other things hurtled at them as they integrated schools, Japanese families rounded up and stuck in internment camps, slavery, Civil War. 

I have friends who’ve intentionally been writing about the goodness of the world…that’s their gift and they do a great job of it. I want to find that hope and see things to be grateful for in every day life, too. Mr. Rogers reminded us to look for the helpers.  Laura Ingalls Wilder said, “As you read my stories of long ago I hope you will remember that things truly worthwhile and that will give you happiness are the same now as they were then. It is not the things you have that make you happy. It is love and kindness and helping each other and just plain being good.”

And Anne Frank was able to see the beauty in a world that locked her and her family in a tiny room for two years and ultimately killed most of them. “It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart,” she wrote. 

If Anne Frank can do that, so can I. The hope is there. So is the beauty. I don’t think we have to give up hope to care about the awfulness of what we see. But I do think we have to compartmentalize to avoid getting sucked into that vortex of despair. So I guess that’s what I’m going to do.