Do you spend too much time on the news? I do. And yet, we cannot ignore what's happening. Certainly as a lawyer, I cannot. Or as a grandmother. This week was January 6, the day Trump supporters stormed the Capitol trying to overturn the 2020 election. Trump has now pardoned those criminals and the White House website this year claims that they were peaceful patriots. But we all watched it.
This week in Minneapolis an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good through her windshield as she was turning her car around. Dead at 37 and her children left motherless. The administration says the killing was in self-defense. But it's on video.
Let's all believe lies instead of our own eyes. Let's just fall victim to false memory syndrome.
Or let's not. Let's do otherwise. Let's take a wintry walk, play with the children, love each other and still remember that shameful, violent January 6 day. Let's pray for the children of Renee Nicole Good. Let's learn lessons from nature during this dreadful time when we're being gaslit by the regime. I'm trying to learn some.
We are at the winter beach this week enjoying wide empty stretches of sand, early sunsets over the ocean, and crisp lung-filling morning air. Oh if only the state of our country were half as good as most of our daily lives with those we love.
One lesson we can learn is that nature never rushes. More applicable to us, it doesn't panic. Even fires, floods and hurricanes don't panic nature. It heals and re-germinates. It has a job and continues to do it. I see that all the time in my neighborhood when forests are clear-cut for timber and in two seasons are lush with small pines. Many of us may have felt like panicking when without Congressional approval the regime kidnapped the President of Venezuela (not a good man) for the country's oil. Something more, or worse, may have happened by tomorrow. So how do we cope?
Nature helps there too. It never gives up. Never. That is our natural course too. If our child is sick, we do not give up. If our leadership is sick, the same. The way a family rallies round, so do communities and states. If we are grieving our country or something more personal, we can take solace in nature. Time spent walking the beach, following a trail, or building a snow fort whisks away mental fatigue. Whatever the problem, we can now face it more efficiently.
The only thing that is not natural is perfection. That is something for which we do not need to strive. The opposition to this administration is not perfect. It doesn't have to be. Our own involvement is not perfect. No guilt there. We are living our lives now under a shadow. But so did our parents: perhaps it was WWII and the Holocaust; the Vietnam War and the protests against it; the Civil Rights movement of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bull Conner hosing black activists; the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Dr. King and Robert Kennedy; or the Watergate hearings. The only sins might be apathy, resignation or acquiescence.
So, yes, live our lives. That's important. While we protest, vote, donate, educate and play in the snow with our children and grandchildren. In North Carolina we have a beloved coach, Jim Valvano who died of cancer, whose words ring true here: "Never give up. Don't ever give up."
Nina Naomi
The outside world feels divisive, pitching us against one another, pulling us away from nature and towards greed.
