Infectious Ideas

While attending a meeting about the history of our country, someone talked about how having all like-minded people in the same room isn’t going to help make a difference in the state of our country right now. She stated we need to have people that see things differently than us attend these meetings if there is ever going to be a change in our country. 

I disagreed with her then as I do now, but could not explain why except to say there is a comfort in being in the same room with other like-minded people. She was adamant that we need to figure out how to reach out to others who think differently than we do, and get the conversation going and sitting in a room with all of us that are in agreement will not change the state of our country.

She was of course right, but it kept bugging me that I had a better argument but could not express it at the time, I had to sit with it, roll it around in my head, so I could better express myself.

Ideas are like a virus, especially if they are great ideas, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness is an idea that has lasted hundreds of years. It is the ideas we live our lives by, the ideas we die for, the ideas that we can have a better world than the one before.

As we listen to the history of our country we hear how those ideas rise up and get crushed back down by violence, and legislation. But for some reason the ideas don’t perish, they don’t get extinguished, and I think the reason why is because they are so powerful, giving people autonomy over their own bodies, supporting people to love who they want to love, educating our children to learn about the best of us, passing laws that take care of the weakest of us and lifting them up the best way we can. These ideas rise again and again even in the most despotic nations of our world, I think because it speaks to our better angels of how we treat each other.

As we gather and listen to the history of our country and the stubborness of our ideas passed down by the fathers of our country, we are like a virus infecting each other with ideas on how our town, county, state, and country can do better.

We carry that virus out in the community to spread by even the little things we do, how we treat each other during the day, the little everyday kindnesses we offer to those around us. We live our lives the way we want our community to become. 

As I attend these meetings, I get recharged, the last meeting was a dreary rainy evening, and I was tired but knew I wanted to come. Listening to the ideas of our country surviving despite all the opposition thrown at it, all the violence, all the anger, yet still the ideas persist because they offer hope of a better life. As I left the meeting I was somehow energized and I didn’t know why, I think it was that hope of a better life recharged me.

I carry that hope and those ideas with me back out into the community, infecting everyone with how I live my life around others, not knowing the impact it will have, but knowing I can’t live my life in anger and fear.

I see the present administration as a hurricane ripping through our country, tearing apart the political norms that have been established in the past. Yet just like the people who board up their windows, determined to stay in spite of the destruction, I attend these meetings, I persisit in a nostile environment, like the flower growing out of the porch in the picture at the top of this page, getting recharged to go out and create “good trouble” in as many ways that I can, whether consciously or unconsciously I know I have an impact, we all do.

As we leave these meetings we recharge each other and infect the community with the most powerful thing in the world, the power of hope for a better life. And what better reason to gather together is there than that?