Breaking News: Benevolent Deeds Reshape Future
"Muslim Americans have helped raise more than $91,000 to repair vandalized headstones at a Jewish cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri, according to an online fundraising page, amid attacks and threats against Jewish institutions." -Reuters
My wife told me about this story tonight as I was stirring the sauce into the farfalle pasta I was preparing for dinner. She had just put our eighteen month old baby to bed and emerged from his room squinting and exhausted into the lights of the kitchen, checked her phone and read the headline to me. Something like, "A Muslim American group raised over $70,000 to repair vandalized headstones in a Jewish cemetery in Missouri." My wife and I have been experiencing greater than usual fatigue as of late due to the heightened tensions in the socio-political atmosphere, the consistent concern over either an injustice being committed or an international calamity erupting upon civilization, but also due to our baby not sleeping, depleted immune systems and too much driving in rush hour traffic. In this state, the news of this story washed over me, and, as I made my wife repeat the headline to me, thought-like images arose in my consciousness. I saw a face that has appeared on various media outlets quite frequently as of late, and I felt the presence of what I can only call a divine intelligence. Against all my self-willed intellectualized logic and informed feelings, I entertained the idea of the current social situation as a divinely ordained, last-ditch, far out attempt by a ruling will to stimulate humanity toward goodness. As though, noticing we were unable to summon the drive to demonstrate adequate empathy and enact tangible, benevolent and productive deeds, certain forces were set into motion to raise humanity to the level at which we should have found ourselves in the year 2017.
"'Muslim Americans stand in solidarity with the Jewish-American community to condemn this horrific act of desecration,' the fundraisers said on their website." -Reuters
"More than 3,000 people had donated $91,583 by late Wednesday afternoon." -Reuters
This was an impulse that rewrites the future. As I heard this news and sublime thoughts and pictures moved across my inner vision like a silent film, I sensed the future shift. In the dread of or interest in or hope for the world in which my son will live, a small flower bloomed in a desert landscape that hadn't seen rain in ages, whose sandy soil can barely hold water anyway, whose arid air and scorching sun demand cactus and lizards that only come out at night. Yellow petaled and thin green stemmed with roots like short and fragile hairs daring to reach down into the earth, the flower flutters in a tentative breeze.