Every morning I have a routine. I make coffee and I read today's edition of What Has President Dumbass Done Today. I visit CNN and Huffpost and the Maddow Blog. Most mornings I growl between gritted teeth ( I do it softly because loud growls upset our 3 cats). Some days I cry.
Today I cried a little.
The lead story on CNN was about an ordinary man, a simple man who does simple yet extraordinary work. His name is Greg Zanis. He lives in Illinois. Since 1996, when his father-in-law was murdered, he has built crosses, stars of David and crescents, put them in his truck and carried them to the site of mass murder and natural disasters. He has made over 26,000 of them in that time and 21,000 of them have borne the names of victims of mass murders. He drives to the site, prepares the ground for them and puts them.carefully in place, often with the family of those who died looking on. He leaves them.there for 40 days and then gives them to the families. He encourages people to write messages and add to his memorial.
He said he cries a lot and tears up remembering the Jewish reporter who was killed in the Capital Gazette attack. The man had volunteered to work that day so his Christian colleagues could spend the holiday with their families. He cries again as he hugs family members who come to watch as he sets up his memorials.
No one asks him to do this. He simply feels called to do it.
A man of simple faith, he is a Baptist and believes the violence and division and hatred in our nation is a result of people turning away from God. He thinks it began with removing prayer from schools. Yet despite this, he has memorialized atheists as well as members of non-Christian religions.
I disagree with his conclusions. I think the murders are the result of too much faith in the rightness of an evil cause and an evil belief in the superiority of one race over another, sometimes cobbled together into a religion like Christian Identity and other churches built on hatred. Combine that dogma with easily available high-powered weaponry, and you get mass violence. Whether the belief system is militant communism, radical Islam as practiced by ISIS, or a twisted kind of Christianity I doubt the carpenter of Nazareth would recognize, the results are the same : the willingness to murder those whose beliefs are different, who love a person of the same sex, or simply look different.
What makes one man pick up a gun to kill the Others, while another man feels called to memorialize the murdered?
I don't know the answer to that.
But I recall the idea in Jewish folklore that there are 36 just men in each generation whose simple goodness keeps YHWH from.destroying the world. There were ordinary people who stood up to Hitler in rhe village of Charenton, France. There were dedicated doctors and nurses caring for Ebola patients. There have always been people doing the right thing just because it is right. I think Greg Zanis, however much I disagree with him on the root cause of these horror scenes, is one of them.
A simple man of simple goodness doing a simple good thing.
He gives me hope. And right now, I will take hope wherever I can find it.