Every year has a narrative that we build together without meaning to. 2018 is shaping up to have a rough one.
It is tempting to look at this year and conclude that everything is horrible. I have enough friends on both the left and the right to know that both sides share this feeling--even though they blame different things and different people. We share our worry that things are going past the point of no return, that respect and common decency are dead, that we don't understand one another, that we'll never understand one another again.
But so long as we share this sense of foreboding, we share something. We're not completely divided. And there's something else we have the potential to share: feeling that something has to be done.
I don't think we're very good at changing great, big things all at once. It hardly ever works out. And the scale of the problem can make us disengage and feel like there's nothing we can do.
But we are pretty good at helping each other. And we know that we are, if we think about it. It's part of why the Mr. Rogers meme #lookforthehelpers speaks to us after a tragedy.
I think it should speak to us every day. I think it should speak to us when we look around and see a world that we worry is broken, or will be. Because I don't know how to fix everything, and neither do you. But if all you have to do is help the people you come across--you can do that. We all can.
2018 is a lot of things. But it's also the year that a desperate person accidentally called a Jimmy John's instead of a social worker to help her brother and the sandwich shop sent someone to help him without a second thought.