Why Can't We All Just Get Along?

I’m sitting at the kitchen table in my son’s house in Minneapolis where I spent Thanksgiving. I was supposed to leave today (written Tuesday, Dec. 3 then put on pause…) and head back home to North Carolina, tearing myself away from my two almost 3-year old identical twin granddaughters, Ruby and Wren. I was actually in line at the gate just getting ready to board when my son Moose texted me and said, “Wren just woke up and said so earnestly, ‘I HOPE Mimi comes back,’” and asked if there was any chance to change my ticket. Well, how could I resist that? Especially when it turned out it was only $50 to make the change! So now I’m here for another 5 days and so very happy!

Sometimes “divine order” isn’t so evident. Today everything worked out in my favor- even the fact that my bag hadn’t been put on the plane yet and I was able to retrieve it a short time later in baggage claim.

When I got back to my son’s house I opened my computer and saw a bunch of comments on the movie “Will and Harper”, which I loved so much that I watched it twice in one week- some of them open, warm, compassionate and others snarky, hate-filled, homophobic and transphobic. I don’t know why and attack this always shocks me. The older I get the more I am completely baffled by the level of fear in our world. All I could think was the line “People are the same wherever we go…” from the song that Paul McCartney did originally with Michael Jackson and later with Stevie Wonder- “Ebony and Ivory”.

I understand less and less. Thinking about war, genocide… killing that has gone on throughout history., throughout so-called “civilization”. (Not civilized!) When I was younger it seemed that it was somehow rationalized (not by me) by looking at the history and circumstances leading up to it. Maybe I’m getting a little too philosophical here but I just don’t get it. And maybe this isn’t the pretty stuff I should be writing about when this is supposed to be a blog about healing… but what needs to be healed more than the mind- individual and collective- that believes in and sees separation, division and “otherness”?