Dear Friends
Timing triggered my latest letter to the editor, published yesterday online by the LA Times. Shortly after I heard his alligator “joke”, I was walking at Santana Park and passed the bench with the message about compassion (pictured just above). I wrote the following letter and e-mailed it to the Times as soon as I got home:
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To the Editor: At my nearby park, there is a “hope and healing meditation path” that includes benches with encouraging messages. One has these words about compassion: “We can never really know what someone else is going through. However, we can listen with our hearts and be open to the depths of others’ pain.”
That message caught my attention during my walk because I had just seen the President of the United States joking about people trying to outrun alligators at his new detention center in Florida (“Trump tours Florida immigration lockup and jokes about escapees having to run from alligators,” July 1). I’ve seen one commentator describe “Alligator Alcatraz” as “performance cruelty.”
Clearly, the president missed a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed with the headline “In an era that celebrates cruelty, embrace subversive kindness.” Clearly, he hasn’t seen the message about compassion on our park bench in Corona. And sadly, his habit of making cruel remarks and his lack of compassion has spread to many in his administration and beyond.
John Saville Corona
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Blog continues here:
As we celebrate Independence Day, I don’t know how we measure the soiling of the soul and character of our country that our current president is responsible for, because it keeps seeping from the top down and is spreading all around.
Issues are always up for debate. But character should not be, because character affects the words we speak and the actions we take. I think we are underestimating the deep and lasting effect of his cruel words and actions, which so many people have come to easily embrace, or ignore because they have normalized it.
There is so much more to reflect upon in response to what is going on right now. In the meantime, a couple of verses from this coming Sunday’s second lesson from Paul's letter to the Galatians, offers hope and advice for us, as we press on amid these challenging days:
“So let us not grow weary in doing what is
right, for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up” (6:9)
“So then, whenever we have the
opportunity, let us work for the good of all, and especially for those of the
family of faith” (6:10)
John
