Seeking the Sparks in a Messy World

Three weeks into 2016’s first month, a lot of bad things are happening. What is going on in the world since New Year’s? It has certainly not been a quiet January.

I used to read the newspaper every day when I was in college. It was a habit I picked up from my dad, z”l (abbreviation for the Hebrew phrase “may his memory be a blessing”), but when the newspapers started reported things I knew were not true about Israel, I stopped subscribing and started getting my news online. This must have been somewhere around the time I had kids, when I sort of dropped out of the real world and the world of news for the most part. (I had my first son in graduate school and spent his early years editing my thesis and then got pregnant with his brother while I received my doctorate.)

After I returned to acting when my younger son was a toddler, most people were getting their news almost exclusively online. I found myself getting very overwhelmed with how depressing especially local news was, and I would often find myself going down the rabbit hole, following link after link at the bottom of a page until I was looking at pictures of women who had had so much plastic surgery that they looked like real-life Barbie dolls. That’s not where my news search had started, but I kept ending up there.

Now that there are newsfeed apps, those are my news source. I select categories I am interested in: “News” and “Science” and “Technology” and that’s enough for now. (Since I do not select “Celebrity” or “Fashion” I thus save myself from those rabbit holes!) I read my share of heavy news, but it’s not of the local variety; it’s typically global news, or big-issue American news. And in that kind of news, nothing is good, it seems.

Don’t get me wrong. I know that somewhere right now, a teenager is raising money to feed the homeless in their town. Someone is rescuing abandoned dogs and finding them homes. Good things are happening. But a lot of bad things are happening. And that’s what we read about.

The planned, calculated attacks on women in at least three German cities and one Finnish city on New Year’s Eve are astounding and disturbing. The quickness to blame immigrants for this is disturbing, and if there is some organized plan by immigrant men to attack and sexually assault women in different cities, that would definitely be infinitely more disturbing.

But we don’t really know what’s going on. What we – or those of us who have read about it in our newsfeeds – do know is that dozens and dozens of women were assaulted in various cities over New Year’s, and it’s different than the assault that unfortunately women are subject to on any given day.

The discussion of closing borders and suspicion about immigrants and all of this hysterical Donald Trump craziness is so upsetting to me. I wrote about the immigrant crisis here on GrokNation, but I don’t know that I understand it any more than I did when I wrote about it.

Religious fanatics have come to the forefront of our news and our fear: people talk about all Muslims being threats. People talk about certain Muslims being threats. People talk about us needing to protect ourselves from Muslims who may be threats by denying rights to those who may not be. It’s a mess and no one seems to know what to do about it.

And it’s not just immigrant and radical jihadi Islamists shooting and bombing people and places in the news. Also this month, a teenage girl was raped by four teenagers in Brooklyn after her father was threatened at gunpoint by the teenagers and chased away. It’s the worst story I have heard in I don’t know how long. Teenagers – fourteen, fifteen and seventeen years old – who raped a girl who was walking with her father at 9 pm near a playground.

What is happening?

Bombings and terrorist killings happen every single day. The news is full of them; so full we become numb to the reports, especially when they are far away.

It’s a mess. And we have an election coming up here in the States. What fears will be preyed upon (and are already being exploited) to try and win this election? What is most important to our country right now? What is most important to the world and where do we fall in making important things happen for the greater good of humanity?

I feel like I might need to take a news break. But it’s not because I need to just read positive happy news stories: this stuff is going on all the time and I don’t want to ignore it.

My sons asked me the other morning why I was on my phone and I told them I was reading the news. “Why?” Little Man asked. “Because,” I answered. “Because I am a member of this planet and I care about what’s going on. Sometimes it makes me sad, but sometimes it inspires me to try and help somehow.”

I’ve been accused more than once of sheltering my kids too much; of being too protective because they didn’t go to preschool, because they are homeschooled, because their dad and I know what they are doing pretty much all of the time and therefore don’t wonder if they are being bullied or beat up or called names that will stay with them forever.

People – well-meaning people – have accused me of raising children who can’t take care of themselves because, as they saw it, I was not letting them out of the range of my protection. But those people are wrong. Homeschooling isn’t sheltering. It’s choosing what your children experience for a lot of reasons. But they still have to experience the world. And they do.

I wonder if it’s too much to tell my kids about poverty. About what it was like to wake up to the Twin Towers of my favorite city being brought down by planes used as weapons by people who were taught to believe it was a good thing to kill innocent people. About mental illness and the things it can do to families. About why people smoke even after they’ve had their throats cut open to cut out cancer. It seems too much.

But then I think about children in Syria and Iraq and all over the world who experience childhoods of war and death and horrible tragedy. No one sheltered them. How will they grow up? Can they be protected ever?

I let my sons know that the world is a scary place and bad things happen. People believe things that sometimes make them do hurtful things. War is bad, and it always hurts children and mommies and daddies. Always. And sometimes wars have to be fought. But that I pray for a world where they don’t have to be fought.

And I don’t make my kids feels responsible for fixing the world, but I raise them with the Jewish concept I was raised with, of tikkun olam, or repairing the world. And as the Jewish text states: “It is not your task to complete. Neither are you free to remove yourself from it.”

I hope my children are raised with a healthy, age-appropriate dose of both reality and idealism. They will cry and struggle the way I do when they are old enough to see the reality of what I see when I check my newsfeed every day. And I hope that, like me, they will find the idealistic spark inside of them that contains a hope big enough to help them believe that their one tiny spark can somehow start a fire.

What can that fire ignite? Whatever my children and yours can dream up: shelter, education, love, safety. Maybe even a revolution.

The world is a mess. We all have a spark in us. Maybe we can put them all together somehow and ignite change. I don’t know how. But awareness is the first step, I’m sure of that. I want to run from the news sometimes, but ultimately, I don’t run. I can’t run. There is too much at stake.