Mercy in the Playground of Children

“No one can do an injury to you without doing an injury to themselves.”

― David Adams Richards, "Mercy Among the Children"

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Dear Kate,

Congratulations!  Your country will soon again have someone presidential in her highest office.

I wasn't making a politic comment.  The fact that your country is so very evenly divided speaks about the aspirations and grievances of, on superficial reading, "two" sides, a legitimate dialectic necessary to check and balance power, which will always be abused, as long as it is in the hands of human.

What I meant to say was simpler, much more obvious, that it is laudable to be respectful.

If this is too trite a point to make we must wonder why the point needs to be made at all, as a whimper of a footnote to a national tragedy.  Yes, even if my little child is 110% right in a playground fight, if he's to desecrate the sanctity of another life he will necessarily forfeit that of his own.  The magnitude of his downfall is how right he might have been along his path to hell.

It was a rousing, "Presidential" speech your new man gave.  I want to talk like that when I am 78 (yes, not 77, his birthday next week).  Of course, false hope abound, as is with all political speech, to save people from, before anything else, despondency, but it was energetically delivered.

He believes Americans can define America in one word, a plural: possibilities.  Do you?

The aspiration begs the question whether life has ever been "possible," in or outside the framework of an American narrative, a question of human flourishing.

He claimed "(The USA) is a great nation. And we are a good people. This is the United States of America. And there has never been anything we haven’t been able to do when we’ve done it together."  What are the impossibilities you have achieved, together, today, with your fellow Americans?

It is a cold day, frigid by the standard of where you are, sitting in a rain shadow enjoying mostly a year-long Mediterranean climate.  Would it be possible for you to go out there today, now, and embrace the warmth in the chill of creation, not staying inside cranking up the heat making life impossible for many others around the globe, going "together" to the frontier of human limits and expand the boundary of human possibilities, if your fellow Americans are to go there with you?

Would they go there with you?  To "have your back," as your new man said he will?  Are the Americans "in this together"?

I am not talking cynically.  I am asking questions with a straight face.  We must stay hopeful to not fall into despair.  We want to know we have the answer to our own longings.  But what are our longings?

If the vision of their fulfilment would necessarily entail doing injury to others, not having someone else's back, would we risk losing our souls in our field of dreams?

Yours, Alex