Gratitude Monday: The good in us will win

One of the great benefits of being at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing for, effectively, Tuesday through Saturday, was my limited access to news. Specifically to news of the catastrophe sitting on its fat arse in and around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

For those four-and-a-half days, I basically only went online through my laptop to write posts here. The rest of my Internet access was via my mobile phone, to live-tweet the various sessions I attended, to check emails for party invitations/locations and to hail Uber and Lyft drivers. No hourly BREAKING stories about what disgusting, unconstitutional, cruel, petty, vindictive or obnoxious crap was coming from the Kleptocrat and his minions. Just learning, socializing and clocking 14,000 steps on my pedometer every day.

I did not realize what a heavy drag that constant stream of shit was on me until I was away from it and then returned to it. The closest analogy I can make is how I didn’t realize what a burden living in LA smog was until I left the area and only returned for visits. Then the painful throttling of my lungs as I tried to breathe became obvious. When I was living in it, it just…was.

When I got back to the District They Call Columbia last Saturday, and skimmed the Washington Post front page, I felt my lungs constrict in pain, and I wanted to cry. I can’t even recount all the monstrosities that had accumulated in those four days; I just don’t want to give them head room. But the weight was crushing. How, I wondered, are we going to undo the destruction of the environment, the dismantling of healthcare safeguards, the selling of laws to the highest campaign contributors, the plundering of our treasury for the aggrandizement of Klepto and his Cabinet members, the abandonment of the people of Puerto Rico, the undoing of international commitments, the pissing on the Constitution? I don’t think I have ever felt so desolate.

Well, a while ago I wrote about my friend who became bat mitzvah. One of the passages from the prayer book she read was so beautiful, I jotted down parts of it, and looked it up later and wrote out the full text. I was reminded of it by another friend posting this on Facebook:

This is the passage, from the Mishkan T’filah:

The good in us will win,

Over all the wickedness, over all the wrongs we have done.

We will look back at the pages of written history, and be amazed,

And then we will laugh and sing,

And the good that is in us, children in their cradles, will have won.

Dear God, but I hope this is the case. Let me—and others like me, but stronger and smarter—let us find the way to resist this evil, overcome this wickedness; let us—or our children in their cradles—look back, be amazed, laugh and sing, and know that we have won.

This is what I’m holding onto, on this Gratitude Monday.