Take Life Seriously

I’ve been accused of having no sense of humor, which is not true. I find stupid, silly, camp movies quite hilarious. I appreciate gag gifts. I find the antics of my grandchildren amusing. I often crack jokes or tell funny exaggerated stories.

But what I don’t like is treading the thin line between serious and funny. My husband puts on a clip of “Saturday Night Live” and I mistake it for real news—and vice versa. I don’t like making light of something serious, because it allows people to accommodate to situations they should not tolerate. And what is going on in our world today may often be bizarre, but it is deadly serious. We have to keep it at the forefront of our attention, and not get used to the daily horror stories as a condition of life.

This weekend we celebrated my husband’s birthday. Three of our four children were home, along with other family members. My husband enjoyed chatting with our other son and some friends on the phone. It was a really fun time: delicious food, laughter, conversation. The weather was gray but the house cheerful, colorful, and yummy smelling.

That was our inside world. In the outside world it was a pretty awful weekend. An mass shooter killed two students and injured nine others on the Brown University campus, right where my youngest son attended school only two years ago. Another mass shooting in Australian killed numerous people attending a Hannukah party on a beach. Actor/director Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered by their mentally ill son. What was perhaps most disturbing, though, was Trump’s rambling, incoherent, heartless response on (of course) social media. He politicized what was a personal tragedy and made it all about him, like he does everything. This is an insane out of control narcissist, and he is President of the United States.

There is much that is precious and wonderful in my life, and I’m sure in yours. Concurrently, there’s much evil afoot in the world and we have to call it by its name, and take whatever appropriate action needed. We can hold both these realities in our head at the same time. A friend recently suggested to me that people are just “tired”. Maybe so. It’s a tiredness we owe it to ourselves to transcend. Joy and pain are real. What we can’t afford, personally or as a society, is ironic distance.