One of the best things about a holiday is the opportunity it offers to escape all the bad news, if only for a while, and to enjoy the company of friends and loved ones. Sometimes they offer an opportunity to actually run away, which is exactly what Arthur and I did when we took a very brief weekend excursion to Chicago to see my beloved Cubs.
Like most breaks from reality it was all too short because these days reality never really stops coming at us like an angry bull. Another mass shooting, another attack on women’s reproductive rights, another book banned, another assault on LGBT people, on Black people, on anyone defined as “woke.” And then there’s our ubiquitous former president, frothing at the keyboard as he hurls insults at … well pretty much everyone outside his shrinking circles of fervent followers.
According to many reliable polls, I am not alone in my exhaustion. A growing majority of Americans are becoming sick and tired of ginned-up culture wars that serve no purpose other than to divide people from each other. Well, that’s not quite right. Culture war-mongers also crave the power they gain from the division they sow.
Demography and, frankly, the good sense of the majority of Americans are not on their side. They know this. It’s one of the main reasons that they work so hard to exhaust us. Which is exactly the reason we cannot allow that to happen.
During some of the darkest days of ancient Jewish history, one rabbi offered this advice:
“It is not your obligation to finish the work, but neither are you free to neglect it.”
We are limited creatures with finite mental resources. Our Humanistic mission — to create a society centered on human dignity and informed by reason — is overwhelming. No single person can achieve it and even our best collective efforts are bound to enervate us even to the point of bodily and spiritual collapse.
When it does, after we can breathe once more, let us pick ourselves up and get back to work, remembering the words of that ancient sage:
We are never free to neglect it.