GETTING SERIOUS

Grandson Carter is home-schooled in that, like most of his contemporaries these days, he is taught by being online with his teachers. He has a desk in his mother’s office and another in his dad’s, both of whom have been working from home for months. I know it hasn’t been easy trying to work fulltime, focused on their tasks at hand, while making sure a six-year-old stays focused on his tasks at hand.

The other day Carter was not so focused. He was being silly and so his mom said to him, “Carter, get serious.” He looked at her and said, “Mom, it’s not like we’re talking about Jesus on Christmas morning.” I mean there is serious and here is serious, or at least different degrees of seriousness. In life one has to know the difference or else one’s life can quickly get out of focus. It happens.

We are living in serious times in this country and in this world. There is nothing more serious than the pandemic. It clouds everything else and until it is under control, the cloud will remain. In the meantime, as we live under this cloud of unknowing because we do not know what the after effects will be once we come out from under it, we have to discern what is serious and what can allow us to find some sense of calm.

The problem, of course, is that not only is the pandemic very serious, there are other issues at hand that are no less serious. The riots in Washington and elsewhere remind us that for a large segment of the nation there are serious issues to be dealt with. Those who invaded the capitol building were not doing so for the fun of it. They were angry because they believed whatever they held to be important to them was being ignored. They believed no one was listening to them, or rather that the only one who was was Donald Trump. He wasn’t of course. He didn’t care. He just used them as he does everyone which is his life-long pattern, sadly to say.

What was and is needed are serious conversations, like the ones Carter has on Christmas morning about Jesus: serious conversations. The rioters need to be taken seriously: their grievances, their needs, their concerns. I don’t walk in their shoes. No one in Congress walks in their shoes. Donald Trump never walked in their shoes. Nor can anyone of us. But we can hear them out. We can have serious conversations with them.

None of those conversations will justify their riotous and deadly actions. And they need to held accountable for them. And so do their enablers in Congress. Those conversations may help us understand why they are so angry. Afterwards we may continue to disagree on how to resolve the issues that brought them to do what they did, but we have to make that effort. If we do not, nothing will change. What we seem to have lost these past few years is the ability and the willingness to enter into serious conversations with one another. That, I think, is why we are where we are today. Carter is right: there is time to get serious. Now is that time.