Taking a Step Back: A Special Report

HARLEM--Friday morning, around 10 am, and I just arrive to work. The temperature is below freezing but very sunny, hardly a cloud in the sky, and if you stand right in the light it's warm enough to strip out of your heavy coat and stand without shivering. The birds are chirping, squirels are out doing...squirrel stuff, and the streets are pretty much empty, our residents peacefully going to work. That's the key word here: peaceful. The morning is just about as idyllic as one could imagine outside of a Robert Frost poem. Even the air tastes fresh.

But from reading the front page of the New York Times this morning one would think that the world is going to hell in a hand basket. There's a US report from the Justice department regarding an abuse of power by the FBI, more on the Walter Reed scandal, a story on a Bronx fire that took the lives of eight children and one adult, and crime in cities is on the rise. Yet looking at the paper in my hands and looking at the world in my face under the bright, nearly divine light, the two seem to contradict each other. In order for one to exist the other must be a work of fiction. And in a novel that would be the case.

But this isn't a work of fiction, this is the real world. And the real world is complex. The real world is full of contradictions and paradoxes. Regardless of what some pundits will tell you there is moral relativism, and all people are filled with some amount of good and evil regardless of race, creed, and religion. To love something, or someone, one must be accepting of the whole thing, not just a part of it--that section that shines.

The media and other elements will sometimes twist the truth for their own purposes, while others innocently twist it to create a narrative that makes sense, and while I can't say with certainty which one the Times falls under I will say this: Holding on to your sanity is an exercise where a person must accept two diametrically opposed truths at one time. You must be both a liberal and a conservative, a Republican and a Democrat, a heterosexual and a homosexual, and everything else in between to some extent because the truth is that one cannot exist without the other. That is not to say you can't pick a side, or decide on a particular position and fight for it--that is the calling of mankind--but to live, to exist without losing your head, you have to understand that regardless of anything you do the two sides will survive with or without you. Today is beautiful even if the front page of the NY Times (and I'm sure every blog I'll look at today) tells me the world is going to shit. Our challenge is to reconcile the two. And I know we can, if we take a step back.

And now we continue with our regularly scheduled programming...already in progress.