We were gathering for dinner recently when my daughter's boyfriend asked if we'd heard the news.
"Oh, no, what now? Where?" one of us asked.
"France," he said. "A truck plowed into a Bastille Day celebration in Nice. They think 80 people are dead."
We'd just been through a week of bloodshed in America: Two black men had been killed by white cops in separate incidents, one on a Tuesday in St. Paul, Minn., a second on Wednesday in Baton Rouge, La.. And then on Thursday, a black sniper sought revenge by gunning down five police officers during an otherwise peaceful protest in Dallas, Texas.
Like everybody else, our family was still reeling from these back-to-back homeland events, even as we anxiously awaited the beginning of the Republican National Convention in nearby Cleveland, Ohio, where open-carry gun laws were bringing nervous comparisons to the wild West.
And now here we were again, dedicating our mealtime prayer to the dead and wounded, analyzing the dark side of humanity, making the associations that would call us into empathy anew: France's Bastille Day is like our Fourth of July, which means children must have been present.
Like always after one of these horrific incidents, we found connection and compassion that night. We spoke gratitude for our own safety and security even as we offered prayers for the victims and their families. We offered support to our friends with French connections and posted notes of solidarity on social media.
But more bad news was to come.
Just in the week after Nice, nine were killed and 27 wounded by an 18-year-old gunman in a Munich, Germany, shopping mall. That same week, a white cop once again shot a black man, this time a therapist who was attempting to calm an autistic patient.
And the question becomes: How much?
With smartphones in every pocket and social media connecting every corner of the planet, we find ourselves bearing personal witness to more tragic events than ever before in human history. As citizens of the world, we are called to care about each of these situations, to change our Facebook profile photo to the flag of the moment, to become outraged activists for every cause and role models of abiding compassion for our children.
In the meanwhile, while we work and wait for better gun laws, for a cure for racism and terrorism and for a presidential candidate who can cross these great divides, I have to wonder, how much can we take? How much can we feel? How much can we fight?
In the days and hours surrounding each of the tragedies of recent weeks, I watched social media explode, as I also felt my blood pressure rise and my skin crawl with anxiety, despair and just plain overload. I saw the pronouncements from Black Lives Matter and the retaliatory posts from All Lives Matter, even as I feverishly re-posted and covered Facebook in my own pronouncements. After Dallas came the emergence of Blue Lives Matter, adding to the confused cacophony of calls for justice.
But then, from the depths of our collective weariness, on cue one day, like so many sandbags laid so the river won't spill, a video appeared, of a happy black guy wearing a T-shirt proclaiming "Free hugs today" and hugging white cops. Prayers and poems and stories of healing and love began appearing alongside rants. I saw a clip of a tearful white police officer, netting 13 million views, holding hands with black protesters and praying for peace before the GOP convention. Another film showed up of a Catholic nun on a bridge in downtown Cleveland, on the eve of the convention, leading thousands of people in a meditation she called a "Circle of Love." A friend posted that she doesn't know how to fix the world, but she is going to open doors for people and find kind things to say to them, no matter who they are.
I saw these posts, and I felt awash in a truth philosophers have been espousing since there was language _ a different ism that American writer Max Ehrmann expanded in the years between world wars, in his elegant poem Desiderata: "With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world."
Inspired by these bearers of light, I decided that day to write my own poem of love and understanding. I decided to reach out to six people who don't vote like me; to ask for their stories; and to only listen, as they spoke. I made a vow that day, too, that for every serious, issues-based piece I post on social media, I would post six celebratory stories and photos from my collection. So far, in one week, I've kept my promise, so that my timeline is now satiated with sunshine and flowers and musicians and smiling people. My notifications are no longer spilling over with people eager to argue, but people eager to relate.
I also made it a point that night at the dinner table to tell my family a story that was making the rounds on the internet again, of a Palestinian woman in traditional clothing, who collapsed in tears at the Albuquerque, N. M., airport. She needed to be in El Paso, Texas, for major medical treatment the next day. She didn't speak English and couldn't understand her flight was not canceled, only delayed.
The airport announced that an Arabic-speaking person was needed at Gate A-4 to help explain. A writer named Naomi Shihab Nye responded, and soon the woman was laughing and chatting and pulling out a sack of her native mamool cookies, little powdered sugar mounds, and offering them to all the women at the gate.
"It was like a sacrament," Naomi wrote in "Honeybee," a collection of her poems and short stories. "The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the lovely woman from Laredo _ we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. Then the airline broke out free apple juice and two little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they were covered with powdered sugar too.
"This can happen anywhere," Naomi wrote. "Not all is lost."
I can never completely shield myself and my family from the bad news of a broken world that needs our care and attention.
But even in the midst of darkness, there will always be good news to create, witness and share.
This is a call to action, too.
