Small Beer

Your reaction to yesterday’s post about myself and my family was very gratifying, welcome and humbling.

I don’t mind admitting now that I gained strength to face this from our church, a church my son had led us toward. A few years ago he said, "I want to join a church," and this is the one he chose.

I don’t often go to service,  and as I noted the sermon helped me, but it also made me feel a little ashamed at my grief. The service always begins with concerns and celebrations, and the concerns expressed this day were truly horrible — parents dieing, people in hospitals, cancer. I had passed what I took to be a bald-headed man upon approaching our pew, and found then it was a woman, undergoing chemotherapy, not expected to survive. She smiled and waved when she was recognized — she hadn’t been expected to make it to the service.

I was small beer compared to this. My kid is taking a hard knock but he’s well, he’s smart, he’ll get through.

It reminded me of all the hooha concerning Ellen DeGeneres and that silly dog last week. There she was, blubbering on her show because she had made a mistake, and police had taken her hairdresser’s dog away. It was terribly tragic, and made great fodder for the nightly newscasts.

Now, that whole region is burning. Homes by the hundreds are going up in smoke. Ash is filtering through everyone’s face masks — millions are being poisoned. My mother and sister and brother live out there, and one of the fires is approaching my sister’s house. We’re estranged, my sister and I, over small intra-family things which I had nothing to do with, but which she thinks are important, and which have caused her to keep her children from their grandmother’s sight.

Small beer, that dog. Small beer, too, my sister’s estrangement. It’s all small beer when the world is going up in flames, when the beautiful dreamland of my father becomes a living hell, and the army that could provide some help is 7,000 miles away, wasting away in desert sands, while 10 million kids risk losing their health insurance, and all we can do is watch, pray, wish, and hope.

News stories work best when they’re about people. Find one person and have them tell you what it’s like — that’s all TV news does these days. We just got out of our house before it caught fire, and there’s nothing left. I have to get these horses of mine out of that canyon before the fire rushes in on them. I’m in a wheelchair, being evacuated, and God bless America because people care.

When we break great events down like this, we get a reaction to them. The reaction is gratifying. But we’re also missing the real story. Why is this happening? What must we do to prevent it? Who’s to blame and how do we take action?

These are derided as policy questions, as "politics." Just politics. Better to cry over a little dog than get mad at the people in Washington, the Republicans who refuse to change, the Democrats who cower before them, the media which enables it all.

In my son’s case, I’m going to crusade for better identification of ADD kids, and dyslexic kids, and pray that we stop calling them disabled, that we work to fix what’s missing and celebrate the strengths which are there. Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt, and I wonder what history might have been like had the obvious dyslexia of George W. Bush been found when he was young, had he been treated with compassion rather than shame or calls to discipline, and whether we might all one day recognize the difference between small beers and the great big keg of trouble that is America in crisis.