Skip to main content
The day after the midterm elections ...

This blog post will be appearing on the day after the midterm elections.  As I write a few hours before results are in, we are still reeling from the recent violence caused by racial and religious hatred and, in the case of the pipe-bombs, by an apparent inability to deal with anger stemming from intolerance. More hatred, clothed slightly differently.

But by the time this is posted, we will have had an election, one that may make a huge change in how our country is to manage its affairs or may further empower those who have been in charge for the last two years. I will not hide that my hope has been for the change.

However, whatever the outcome in the control of various seats of power, I will continue to hold out another hope, one that is longer in scope than a single election and broader than any single electoral victory or defeat. It is that we – all of us – will commit to teach, learn, and continue to build the practices we need that will sustain us as a community, one community. 

And one of the most basic of these practices is listening.

We are having difficulty listening to one another right now. Just a few words are said and we “know” that person is for or against the thing we “know” is right or wrong. We quickly blast out with a comeback, as if we are living in a sitcom. Without subtlety or nuance, without putting ourselves in the other’s shoes, we “know” the most important things about them and we know how to tell them off. 

Of course, we don’t “know” and the more we insist we do, the less well we listen. And as we stop listening to others, the habit of introspection, of listening to what we ourselves are thinking and then questioning it, also deteriorates.

We believe things that make no sense because we saw them on Facebook or on TV, and everyone else saw them and repeats them. We don’t stop to actually listen, so we don’t actually think, so we allow ourselves to be convinced by sound bites, ads, glib memes in every format.  And the bonds of our community are weakened by public discourse that lacks dignity and integrity.


I believe there is one thing that we really do know:  we are only going to sustain what is good and change what is not good if we work together. That is a simple idea, easy to say and hard to do. And we cannot even start on it if we continue to shout at each other so loudly that we cannot hear.


Elaine Learnard
Member, Conscience Bay Quaker Meeting

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Our Diversity is Our Strength

I was riding the subway with my husband.   We were headed towards Penn Station, returning home after seeing a Broadway show in Manhattan.   It was rush hour, the subway was crowded and I was lucky to get one of the last seats.   It was amazingly quiet for such a crowded car.   Most people were looking at their phones or listening to a device.   There were quite a few pairs of wireless earphones on people.   Their heads nodded slightly to the beat of noiseless music, or their eyes glazed over as a mystery book played in their ears.   There was a rich variety of humanity on that single car- multiple ages, ethnicities, races, ages and income levels.   I marveled at the diversity and the peaceful coexistence in this tiny piece of New York City. My eyes glanced over to the man sitting next to me.   He was holding a book and reading it very intently.   Reading an actual book is a relatively rare occurrence these days, but what truly caught my attention was the unusual prin
Post a Comment
Read more

Make even these days count

One of the most popular features on a local newscast of a small TV station is something rather surprising. It is a feature called- “The Day of the Week”.  Today is…….. Monday!  The station put forth this as a kind of joke at first, but it was so popular that it became a regular daily addition to the morning newscast.  Apparently, so many of us have lost track of what day it is that we need a reminder. During this stay-at-home time, every day seems to blend into the next.  It is truly difficult to remember how many days we have all been quarantined at home, what the date is and what day of the week it is.  Many of us have a few markers that help- jobs that pause for the weekend, celebrations of Fridays, Saturdays or Sundays- special days of worship.  But even with these, the days seem to bleed into each other like a striped shirt washed in hot water. The period that we are in right now in the Jewish calendar is ironically, a time of counting. A time when we purposely try to keep
Post a Comment
Read more

Advent Lessons

As we come to the last days of Advent, the season in Christianity of waiting, I am reminded of the words of Sr. Joan Chittister, a Benedictine Sister of Erie Pennsylvania, known for her social justice stance and working with and for the marginalized. “Advent is that unchangeable season when the same concepts, the same words rise over and over again, year after year, to challenge our hearts and plague our minds. Advent is the season of waiting. And who hasn’t waited? When we are little children, we wait for gifts from our parents. When we are young adults, we wait for the lover who will take us to the magic world of Everything. The problem is that the presents pale and the magic world sags all too quickly into reality. But then Advent comes, relentlessly and throughout life, with its words of hope and faith—shepherds and magi, crib and star, Emmanuel and glory—and stirs our hearts to pinnacles of possibility one more time. Ruben A. Alvez wrote, ‘Hope is hearing the melody of the future;
1 comment
Read more