Year 2020: Proceed with Caution

I like beginnings and ends and ends and beginnings. Ordinarily I begin the New Year with Hope. This New Year is different. I am ambivalent about Hope. I am wary.

I have concerns about our national leadership.   

I am apprehensive about how technology—wonder that it is—and social media will impact the 2020 national elections. When videos can be edited to distort the true meaning, pictures can be photoshopped to change the perception, our purchasing patterns and now church attendance can all be ascertained via our computers and cell phones; misinformation, alternative facts and manipulation multiply daily. What is true?

I am confounded with the hate crimes which keep happening. I don’t understand hate. I understand anger, frustration, conflict, disappointment, but not hate. What fills someone with hate? Why are we so afraid of people who are different than us?

I am overwhelmed and deeply saddened with the violence that has erupted in our communities. And we think more guns are the answer. How did we get here?                                                                                                  

Still I believe that we can change, individually and as a nation. Change happens one person at a time which leads to Community change and change as a Nation.

Remember automobiles before seat belts and kid car seats were mandatory? And my favorite, No Smoking on airplanes? It wasn’t the Government that initiated the ban on smoking on airplanes. It was a group of concerned, determined citizens. People like you and me. (Google: Americans for Non-Smoking Rights, ANR).

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Each of us does and can make a difference in ordinary ways, in ordinary times, in ordinary places.

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Have you ever noticed that when you stop to let another car get in your lane ahead of you, two cars back will do the same thing? Kindness is contagious.

To quote novelist, Henry James:

Three things in life are important;

            The first is to be kind,

            The second is to be kind.

            The third is to be kind.

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Please join me in bringing Kindness into 2020.

Bridget