With the holiday spirit hanging in the air---the decorations
lighting up the neighborhood nights, the Christmas music and good cheer heard in the stores, the parties lined up on the calendar---it feels like I’m living
in an twilight zone. I swing from being genuinely happy in the ho-ho-ho
season to feeling guilty about that. Who am I that I get to be light-hearted
when so many people in Southern California are losing their homes and livelihoods to raging
fires that are destroying thousands-upon-thousands of acres? Who am I that I get to be in
my warm, well-lite home when 66% of the people in Puerto Rico are still without
power since Hurricane Maria destroyed the island in September?
FEMA is closing operations in our southern states but their
workers aren’t getting a much needed break. They’re headed out to California
and you can’t help but wonder how much longer our nation can afford to fund all
the natural disasters we’re having back-to-back. If we lose our power grid here in
the frozen north this winter, for example, will anyone be here to
set up shelters for us? Yet our lawmakers are giving big tax breaks to billionaires thus raising our national debt but when it comes time to balance the budget it will be
cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security that Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell have
in their crosshairs. They’ve actually spoke those words out loud and we’re
supposed to say, “Oh, well,” and go back to our holiday cheer. If I drank I’d
get one of those Virgin Wines Advent Calendar boxes. Open a door every day and
pull out a bottle of bubbly.
I am getting whiplash trying to keep up with the changes the
current administration is making. This week Trump set things in motion to relocate
an embassy to Jerusalem against the advice of virtually every world leader, and
he’s radically slashed the size of protected lands in Bears Ears and Grand
Staircase-Escalante National Monuments by 2 million acres---to the orgasmic
delight of mining and oil exploration companies. And Utah is just the beginning.
The administration has plans to shrink land in 24 national monuments including in
Montana, California, Kentucky, a few states out east and the new marine monument in the Pacific Ocean. The smallest monument park, one in Mississippi that is dedicated to an early NAACP official who was assassinated by white supremacists in the
1960s is already under an acre in size. What possible justification could
there be for slashing that national monument land in half other than it being dog whistle gesture to the guys who like to march around with Tiki torches?
Breathe, pace myself.
Yes, time to change the topic. One of the commercial blogs I read from time
to time had a topic this week titled A
Powerful Reason to Give Gratitude During the Holidays and into the New Year.
The bottom line, according to the article, is the holidays are often stressful so
we need to double down on the act of giving gratitude throughout the day. “Gratitude
stimulates your neurotransmitters, the hormones that bring energy and happiness
into your living experience.” Or so they claim. Call me a cynic but sometimes I
think the wine would work better.
All kidding aside, I am grateful for the things the Sixty & Me blog article said I need
to focus on: the people in my life, my talents and the events in my past that
helped make me who I am. Although if I’m to be 100% honest here, I’m still
working on being grateful for the latter. Being a widow helped make me who I
am. Being my husband’s caregiver for so many years helped make me who I am. Watching
my mom die due to a series of human errors helped make me who I am. These events may have made me a stronger person yadda, yadda, yadda but I was pretty
happy with myself before I was tested with these challenges. So my gratitude in
this area is not written in flowery cursive in a cloth-covered gratitude journey.
If I wrote them down at all, I'd write them in pencil so I could erase them from time to time when
I’m decidedly ungrateful and I’ve dedicated an hour to a pity party.
What I am is immensely proud and grateful that I can still
feel a full range of emotions, that I still have empathy and a sense of
humanity that have not been crushed by Man or Nature. I am also grateful that Time Magazine chose the “Silence
Breakers” that launched a global movement against sexual harassment as their ‘Person
of the Year’ cover. I predicted it would Tarana Burke, the #MeToo Movement’s
creator, and I got that and so much more. Woman Power is back and “the future
belongs to those who are passionate and work hard.” Yes, I understand the audacity of quoting that line from Al Franken’s resignation speech in the context of the Time’s magazine cover. Life is messy. ©
