Good People

There are so many fine human beings in the world. If I started a list of the people I know personally—including just about all the children I teach—I believe it would fill 10 pages. People from Iran, from Turkey, from Ghana, from South Africa, from Thailand, from Brazil, from Colombia, from Finland, from Iceland, from Spain, from China, from Japan, from India, from Indonesia, from Australia, from Canada and some 45 other countries where there are good people I know as colleagues, students, friends. Oh, and also many from the United States of America!

I’m talking about people who are intelligent, warm, funny, kind, quirky, artistic, sincere, authentic, thoughtful, imaginative, caring and pretty darn good-looking to boot. They make me happy in their presence, they do good work, they pitch in to beautify and care for and uplift the world. They’re not saints or without their faults and challenges, but they’re all working on being better versions of themselves in one way or another.

Why am I talking about this? Because the other day I was sending postcards to people who are pretty much the opposite of those qualities above, people like Mitch O-Connell and Jeff Sessions and Paul Ryan and the Donald and just envisioning these people while writing the postcards made me feel unclean and contaminated and tainted and grimy and dirty and all the other synonyms the thesaurus can come up with. Why are these people the ones in the public eye, the ones making horrible decisions designed to further benefit themselves with no thought for the well-being of others? Give me any ten of my list of hundreds of people above to get as much press coverage and immediately the world would feel like the antonyms of the above list. How I would love to write postcards to them!

I’ve been around the block enough times to know that it is often the despicable who dominate the daily news and the history textbooks, but every once in a while, you just have to pause and think, “Why?”

And so I did.