Bob CollinsThe world is populated by decent people, but today — unlike almost every other day — it seems impossible to prove the assertion by watching, listening to, or reading the news.
This is your world today, humans:
2 police officers killed in Des Moines in apparent ‘ambush-style’ attacks (NPR)
Mom gave kids heroin to make them sleep (BBC)
Man charged with pressuring 11-year-old boy to smoke meth (WDAY)
DC woman accused of trying to flush newborn son down toilet (Star Tribune)
Harvard president orders review of soccer team’s sexually explicit ‘scouting report’ (Boston Globe)
Baylor official called women who reported sexual assault “mentally ill,” Title IX coordinator says (Dallas News)
In the Nevada desert, Bundy family warns of another standoff (Washington Post)
This would be a great day for science to announce it’s discovered a cure for something.
My colleague, Kristi Booth, today sent this letter to the editor in the Bemidji Pioneer to me.
It’s the only lifeline we’ve got, it seems, on a day when demons are shouting down the better angels in our brains.
This last weekend I attended a church fish fry near my home here in Becida. Walking into the church was like returning to a fry I had gone to 50 years ago with the exception there were cell phones this time.
However, people were not texting or talking on their smartphones. They were sharing bits of their lives on its screen. There were family pictures, a picture of a new pickup, and I saw one very creative video of how to demolish an old farm building quickly. I noticed as a young girl came over and crouched down beside me. It was not long before someone “found her,” and she was it for the next round of hide and seek. She then closed her eyes and bowed her head and counted out loud to 10. She looked up and around then smiled at me before she ran off to find all of the hiders. There was a young mother with her newly born infant getting the attention any new family deserves. The sounds of many conversations from all of the tables blended together only to be broken up occasionally by an entire table laughing raucously.
As I left the church and stepped out into the slowly darkening twilight, I was certain that 50 years hence there would still be children playing hide and seek, mothers showing off their new arrivals, people sharing bits and pieces of their lives with friends, and laughter. This will all be true despite our rather loud and nasty political season currently playing itself out.
America will endure.
V.C. Angell
Solway
