one good thing

This year people everywhere have found their voices. They have spoken to reporters, mounted a podium, and put it out there on social media. We have heard from parents who are struggling to keep their jobs by working from home while schooling their children. We have heard from families who have lost their husbands and mothers, sons and daughters to senseless police brutality. We have listened to men and women decry the injustice, cruelty, and arrogance that threaten our health, our environment, our democracy, and our lives.

"It's not about finding your voice.

It's about giving yourself permission

to use your voice."

~Kris Carr~

But that's not all. There's the husband and father who has lost his business, wondering how he will shelter, feed, and support his family. What about the friends and families of Covid victims who couldn't be at their loved one's side when the ventilator went silent? Who can imagine what it must be like for the firefighters battling raging wildfires in the middle of a record breaking heat wave? When will we hear from them? What will they have to say?

"Boys, you must strive 

to find your own voice, 

because the longer you wait to begin,

the less likely you are to find it at all."

~Robin Williams~

The one good thing that has come out of the year 2020 is a profusion of stories...stories that explore the Covid-19 pandemic, that expose the problem of violence against people of color, that acknowledge the economic crisis among working class Americans and small business owners. Stories that report on the raging forest fires in California, the debate over reopening schools, and the presidential election. 

Unfortunately, we have also witnessed the silencing of some voices, through suppression of free speech and the right to peaceful protest. Through insults and derision meant to intimidate and censor. Because of grief and fear too deep to be put into words.

We have suffered the emergence of cruelty, of bigotry, of hatred. We have faced silence when we looked for leadership, anger when we needed compassion, and lies when we sought the truth.

If you don't tell your story, or express your thoughts, or reveal your feelings, who will? How will we come to know you? Who else will teach us?

"Our lives begin to end the day

we become silent about things that matter."

~Martin Luther King, Jr.~

jan