Keep the Faith? How?

*Originally published on my Wordpress blog 11.09.2019 

It’s been gloomy and gray these past few days.  Morning temps in high 30’s and daytime it can get up to 70 but the chill lingers, especially in this old house.  The living room, dining room, and kitchen are all north facing and just don’t get warm on a chilly day. The next door neighbor to the north blew my mind this past year by building a unit over his garage.  He no longer resides in that house but he collects rent on the front house and now has built this unit over the garage. The problem is that this new structure looms over our back deck and yard.  It blocks the sun from coming into our kitchen.  The kitchen already was not very sunny  but, before this new addition, we did often have a pretty view to the west through the oak tree as the sun was setting.  We could enjoy lunch at the kitchen table or on the deck and have north facing sunlight shower us. Now that view is gone and the light is diminished and I am angry.  This man traded his neighbor's sunshine and warmth for rent money.  He did come over last winter to show us his building plan, assuming, I am sure, that we would be okay with this.  I was not okay. I had a BIG problem with it. 

Once I'd recovered from his initial communication about the as yet unapproved building plan, I contacted him and asked for another meeting.   He came over a few days later and I appealed to him to consider what this building project would do to our kitchen and our daily lives.  He went ahead with the project anyway.  Once the obnoxious box was under construction, I emailed him and asked him to come over and stand in our kitchen and on the deck and realize what his building had done.  He surprised me by accepting my invitation.  Two days later at the appointed hour, he stepped through our front door and I wasted no time inviting him back to the kitchen table where we had shared meals in the past.  Again, I emphasized how  much his project had impacted us.  I asked him to sit at our kitchen table and feel the imposition of his building.  I asked him to stand out on our deck and imagine how it would be enjoy a summer meal with that huge building overlooking our table.  I told him I felt betrayed. We had been real neighbors once upon a time when he and his wife and child did, in fact, live there.  Then they had purchased a home in a different neighborhood  and had moved on and rented this house out.  All he did say was nothing.  I had the feeling he felt as if this conversation was the necessary consequence of his actions.  The visit was short.  I had nothing more to say.  I only wanted him to see and feel how different our kitchen and meals were going to be with that looming structure lording over us.  He left with few words but said something about  maybe we can revisit this later.  And that was the last I heard from him.  

All this is just to say this feels like our country today.  This is an example of something that is impacting me yet is out of my control. His greed takes away my light.  This is the neighborhood  equivalent of how I feel about what is happening in the country.  I am so angry about it. I feel helpless about things going on around me that affect me and that I can do nothing about.  I am, frankly, glad that I plan to be dead within 15 years.  I can’t stand this kind of behavior and I can’t stop it.  I can’t stop the Republicans from taking apart all the scaffolding that supports the poor, the elderly, children - the most vulnerable in our population.  I can’t stop the big corporations from ruining the environment.  I can’t stop developers from moving in and destroying the beauty.  I can't stop politicians from sending us backwards in terms of climate change.  I can’t stop Big Pharma from driving up drug costs so people can’t afford medications I can’t stop the election fraud that presents itself in so many ways.  I can’t stop the assault on LGBTQ people, on immigrants, on POC - you name it.  I can’t stand it.  I am just this one tiny person.  I throw my hands up in despair.  I know, I know.  Stay focused on the good.  Look for the positive.  Be the change you want to see in the world.  Stay curious.  Keep the faith. Pay attention to poems like this one:

Small Kindnesses

By Danusha Laméris

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”

I am struggling.  It does feel like the world of kindness is caving to the world of greed.  If I allow myself to linger long here I only fall on despair.  What happened to being kind and thoughtful and caring for those less fortunate than we are?  There was a time when the country acted like a community.  Is it even possible to get those days back?  I know everything changes but the greed of billionaires seems to run the country now.  And, for me, that a long time neighbor would ruin a friendship and  literally and figuratively make my life darker so that he could collect more rent money is disturbing.  It is a microcosm of what is happening in the country.  What's the point of fighting against something that you can't beat?