I’m so tired and old. We were gathered together watching the Presidential Debate on Thursday…two old men trying to win the election. I watched Pres. Trump explain and blame away the treatment of the immigrant children and not being able to find over 500 children’s parents. I felt exhausted.
Our two-year old granddaughter, Samantha, came up to me - bored out of her mind - and said, “Time to eat, Nana,” which means we go and pretend to cook and pretend to chomp on Legos. I left the debate, too weary to even be mad.
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| Samantha |
Mike and I occasionally watch The Crown. The episode that we saw last night was about some business people trying to foster a coup of the British government in the 60s. At the end, their spokesperson and a royal family member was talking with his sister, both of them old. His sister, Princess Alice, said, “Now we are just spectators.”
I thought “Is that what I am now? A spectator?”
So many of us are spectators…watching the horrors happening in our world and thinking "I can do nothing.”
I remember talking to delegations of college students and saying to them in my late 50s and early 60s, “I’m old. I’m tired. When are you, the young people, going to take up the baton?”
And now young people ARE taking up the baton and hitting the streets demanding justice for all people no matter their race. Even older people are in the streets…one old peace activist was even shoved down by police and broke his head…but mostly when you look at tapes, it is young people.
Maybe the young people will be our hope for a much, much better future? I hope so. The question is: as they age, will they get caught up in their lives, careers, and become only spectators? Will they be like the protestors of the Vietnam War?
Marching and demonstrating can be exhilarating. I know. I remember the peace marches. Going to jail as a statement can bind one with others. I know. I remember the zip ties, paddy wagons, and jail cells. As one mass of people with one goal, participants can be energized. I know. I remember praying in the Capital Rotunda to call for aid for the homeless.
But doing the day-to-day struggle for social justice and peace is exhausting, especially if you work year-end and year-out.
I sometimes say, “Jesus wasn’t on earth for the long-haul. He died early in life.”
Don’t shoot me, I’m tired.
But then I have the Nicaraguan granddaughter wanting to “cook” and I look at her beautiful brown skin and dark eyes and I think of those Central American children locked in cages away from their mommies and daddies and I know then, being a spectator is not what I was called to be, and though I’m an old woman now and weary to my bones…I need to act.
Our dear late friend, Maggie was a sister of the Nazarene order. After leaving Nicaragua in her 80s, she wrote to me, "I can't see or hear very well any more. I guess I'll just stay here and pray for the world. That is all I can do now."
We can all act. Social justice, peace, goodness, love are not spectator sports.
- Kathleen
