Yes, this was written in 2017, but somehow, every word still applies.
In Texas a little girl who has cerebral palsy committed the crime of crossing a border patrol station near Laredo on the way to having life-saving gall bladder surgery. So the border patrol followed her to the hospital, waited until the surgery was finished, and then took her to a detention facility for deportation. Wow!
We are a heartless people. We elect heartless representatives to congress to make heartless laws to punish people for being poor, or not being white, or not being patriotic enough at football games during the playing of the national anthem. We elected an orange-faced creature with bad hair to the presidency rather than electing a human being with a beating heart. And why did we do that? Because too many people were in favor of health care laws and regulations that help people we don’t like. We elected him to send a message to all the people we don’t like. That message was, “Screw you, why don’t you just die already?” We like that message because we are a heartless people.
But while we are only thinking of ourselves and vowing to let everybody else go to hell, somewhere the music of the dance begins to play. Hear it yet?
Somewhere children are laughing.
Somewhere Santa Claus is real.
Holidays are approaching and, with indictments sealed and in the hands of prosecutors, possible impeachment looms. The happy dance is about to begin again.
Or maybe it never really went away. People did care, do care, about the crisis in Puerto Rico. After the hurricane, Dippy Donald Dimwit tossed paper towels to survivors, apparently suggesting that all he needed to do was that to symbolically get all the people cleaning up while holding on to their own bootstraps and pulling with all their might. Apparently heartless people believe you can levitate if you pull upwards on bootstraps. But Tesla gifted the city of San Juan with solar panels and batteries and started set-up of an island-based solar power grid to get Puerto Rico back online in the modern world. And Elon Musk is taking the steps towards building the future that the pumpkinhead in chief can’t even conceive in his empty pumpkin head. The music sways and builds. The dancers circle each other and first steps in ballet shoes begin.
We are a heartless people. We suffer in our cubicles alone, angry at a heartless world. “Why don’t you love me?” each one of us cries, “aren’t I worthy of love?” But crying never solved a problem. No, counting our regrets and hoarding the list of wrongs done to us never started a heart to beating. But the music builds. Try smiling at that hard-working clerk who takes your information at the DMV, and then thanking them at the end for their hard work even though they have to deny you the permit because there are more bits of paperwork that have to be found and signed. Try making a joke in line at the post office that makes the other hundred and ten people actually laugh while waiting interminably. Do your best to bring light to the darkness, not for yourself, but for other people. The music builds. Do you know the steps to the dance? No? Well, the steps won’t matter if you begin to move to the music, begin to glide… And the heart starts pumping, and we begin to feel alive again. Hallelujah! We are dancing towards the light again.
During my middle-school teaching years I also bought and read copies of The Prince and the Pauper, Roughing It, and Life on the Mississippi. I would later use a selection from Roughing It as part of a thematic unit on Mark Twain where I used Will Vinton’s glorious claymation movie, The Adventures of Mark Twain as a way to painlessly introduce my kids to the notion that Mark Twain was funny and complex and wise.
Catch a Falling Star 