The common misery of the world feels overwhelming. Petty cruelty; major abominations; selfishness, thoughtlessness; slavery, abandonment, abduction, discrimination, hatred, you know the list, it goes on and on and on and on, and this is one of those weeks where it’s been grating on my soul more than usual, one of those months, one of those years.
It occurs to me that I also haven’t been reading as much as I usually do. I haven’t read as many books this term as I usually would have. And although the news cycle is growing ever more frenetic, although the bombardment feels ever harder, the tragedies ever larger and more poignant… I wonder also if I’m maybe feeling them a bit harder this year than usual because I haven’t been reading, because I haven’t had my usual periodic reminder of what human can achieve when we band together, when we choose to do the right thing.
People are miserable. The world is a miserable place. And I need stories to reassure me that humanity can be good, that humanity can be kind, that in the end of ends, at the climax of it all, we can choose to do the right thing.
I’m writing this with Doctor Who on in the background, the ‘Kill The Moon’ episode, and honestly I want to sob that the astronaut’s first reaction to learning that the moon is an egg is to kill it. Why? Why must our impulse always be for violence like this?
But it’s Doctor Who, so we know how the story ends: with a optimistic take on humanity, with Clara stepping in and doing the right thing, even though the entire planet goes dark as it votes for the unborn creature’s death, with one woman standing, a thin, single-human line between compassion and the descent into horror. It ends with the promise that we can be something better. We may have to ignore the masses to do it, we may be the only one standing while the darkness rages around us… But we can do better. We can be better.
And this is what stories remind us.
No matter how bleak this world seems, we can be better.
One baby step toward compassion at a time.