Problems So Large

For the past two days, I've been watching news coverage of the shootings in Arizona--the grave injuries of Congressional Representative Gabrielle Giffords and the injuries and deaths of others, including the death of a nine-year-old girl. I've discussed the 1st Amendment with my husband and children. I've read article after article about the shooter, his mental state, and his unclear, possibly nonsensical politics. For every claim about this tragedy, there's a counterclaim. Ultimately, the discourse about speech and the power of language has taken a turn, I pray, in the direction of reason, peace, sanity.

I pray a lot today. I've spent a long time learning to be happy, learning about living my life in a peaceful manner, in harmony with the Universe. When I look up at the world and hear the hate that so often speaks the loudest in our public rhetoric, the emphasis on the superficial and the material that tops our list of cultural priorities, the narrow-minded hubris that strives to dictate so many of our personal choices, from whom we can love and to what way we can or must worship God, I get discouraged.

I almost forget that change begins with the individual, and I'm the only individual I can change directly. In order to be hopeful about problems so large, I must first tend to those little ones--those that originate in me.

Till later...