Good Morning.
I watched the coverage of the marches that took place around the country and even beyond our shores. The marches were organized by students, initially from Parkland, Florida, who are fed up with mass shootings and the utter lack of attention to the matter by lawmakers at every level of government. In a particularly unfortunate display of this indifference, a former senator from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum, suggested that the kids would be better served by learning how to do CPR so they can assist their friends when they're lying wounded in a school corridor. This guy is off his rocker. We have a real problem in this country: we have fostered a culture where people think the solution to their complaints is to pick up a gun and either shoot the individual with whom they have a dispute or mow down two or three dozen strangers they've never even met. I have no idea how this insanity has come about, but I know that something has to be done beyond a little window-dressing to temporarily soothe the national conscience. There is absolutely no reason for any civilian to have weapons that take out large numbers of human beings in less than a minute.
I am watching the CNN series on Sunday night about the Kennedys. Finally someone is presenting a more balanced look at these people who were and are attractive and intelligent but colossally ambitious and rather impressed with themselves. There's a movie coming out soon, entitled Chappaquiddick, about a young woman who drowned while being driven to the beach by Senator Ted Kennedy. This troubling incident was but one in a saga of tragedies that have befallen the Kennedy family, and the truth is that many have been of their own making but their fans resolutely look the other way in order to think of these people as they wish they were, not as they are. We need our heroes and our pedestals. We grab onto a candidate, even a bumbling idiot, who belongs to the political party of preference, wear campaign buttons, put up yard signs, and vote him or her into office. We automatically hate the opposition, even if the opposition this time around is the better choice. We should have pitched Bill Clinton out the door and we should do the same to the current commander-in-chief. Both
men are serial womanizers and should not be sitting in the Oval Office.
I am also watching the CNN series on the papacy that presents an unusually honest view of the popes throughout a church history wracked with violence, cruelty, corruption, and depravity. The real deal here is that anyone who has ever challenged the authority of The Vatican has suffered terrible consequences, the least of which is ex-communication but up to and including torture and execution. The people who have stepped forward in the past thirty years to challenge the church about the widespread sexual abuse - and it isn't just an isolated problem here and there - and the systematic cover-up of such
unconscionable acts are courageous beyond all telling because first of all, they had to face their own truth, and secondly, they had to risk being threatened, bullied, and alienated by those who refuse to face theirs. It's not just the Catholics, of course. Most churches reward those who play by the rules or who cough up enough money so they don't have to. Most churches can
get real testy if their authority is ignored or challenged. Jesus would be so pleased.
Why we do all of this hide and not seek I'm not sure, but I do know that running from reality permeates everything we do. We wait to see a doctor until the pain is unbearable. We avoid doing the taxes until a week before they're due. We indulge our addictions until our marriages fall apart and family members are turned inside out and upside down. We ignore virtually anything that is inconvenient or uncomfortable, even though the truth always wins. Right now the only ones who seem to understand that are a bunch of students who are fed up with the lies.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
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