It’s possible we’ve reached a moment of creative commiseration. A friend in Iowa was invited to a poverty party–“because why should a worldwide recession spoil all our fun!” the invitation said. Guests were told to bring “a dish to share, a (cheap) bottle of wine, a hard-luck story and a devil-may-care attitude.” We share casserole experiments: food itself becomes communal, everything in the fridge pitching in. You learn a lot about your neighbors when you carpool, and save gas too.
And for every story of swindlers and cheats, dwell for a moment on these: Someone placed an 18-karat-gold diamond ring in the Salvation Army kettle in Uniontown, Pa. A Sioux Falls, S.D., hotel manager came up with a plan to open his doors to 200 homeless people for Christmas. A Santa Clarita, Calif., family took in an 83-year-old woman left homeless by wildfires and helped rebuild her life. Food donations in Paradise, Calif., were up fivefold. “We’ll take a cup of kindness yet,” we sing as we welcome a new year, and never more so than this time. Maybe as times get worse, we get better. Our pain makes us feel other people’s too; our fear lets us practice valor; we are tense, and tender as well. And among the things we can no longer afford are things we never really wanted anyway, like the solitude of snobbery, and the luxury of denial.
Our hope is in what we do to make things better, not in finding fault and identifying what is wrong. Find ways to move forward and help others, not sit in a pool of pity and drown.
paul