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The world seems to be falling apart before my eyes, a whirlwind of careless decisions, a twister of thoughtless bravado taking lives, taking our way of life. My heart aches. Some days I feel like I can’t go on. What will be left for the future? The mother in me mourns for my children. I know I am not the only mother worried. Mother Nature seems ambivalent too. In a single day, she shifts: the temperature is 75 degrees in the afternoon, 17 degrees when night falls; sunshine turns to frost with snow to my knees by morning. In the transition a strong wind wails and rattles my windows, Mother Nature weeping, perhaps. My therapy had been regular walks along a shared use path near my home, but on too many days the weather got the upper hand and I lounged at home instead of exercising. But yesterday I said “enough!” And I set out for a walk along my usual path. Deconditioned from the long, unpredictable winter, I immediately began negotiating with myself for a shorter walk. With every step, I chose a new turn-around-for-home spot, yet a part of me continued to ache for my old self, for that familiar strength and vigor, and, so, that old self kept arguing with the weary, deconditioned one: Turn back. Just to the next intersection. Stop here…and so it continued. It was not the pleasant, mindful walk of my yesterdays. Normally, when times and weather were normal that is, I would take two laps around the giant commercial parking lot at the end of the path. Yesterday, I thought about avoiding the lot altogether, but the negotiations picked up: maybe ONE lap. As I got halfway around, I turned into a smaller sub-lot next to the outdoor exercise area for employees. There I noticed tree branches and twigs sprayed all over the grass and pushed to the edges of the lot by the strong winds. They had come to a stop in a heap along the asphalt curb. In one of the short piles my eyes came to rest on a piece of a branch. It was broken, about two inches long, stripped of its graying bark. What was left was a beautiful stub in a rich burnt sienna, one of my favorite colors in the Crayola box. I picked it up. It was as light as a Styrofoam pellet and as soft as my grandmother’s cheek. There was something about the color and the softness and the strength of this broken piece that I could not part with it, and so I put into my pocket. My fingers rubbed against it as I made the second lap and returned to my home. Mission accomplished. I was back! Back to walking, back to myself. I placed the small piece of the broken tree branch on my desk where I continued to study it. I leave it there now in plain sight to remind me that there can be beauty even in a debris field; things can break and still be strong. Just a piece can still serve us, still feed our inner hungers. “Hang on wherever you land,” the broken but strong and beautiful piece tells me. Someone will find you. You will find each other. One lap or two? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we just keep trying.
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From time to time there is discussion about ending the filibuster, a procedure in which a member of the legislature prolongs debate in order to delay or prevent a vote on a bill. There is a long history of its use. Eliminating the filibuster has been in the news repeatedly the last three presidential terms, but no one has been able to obtain enough votes to end the use of the tactic. So, it continues. Basically, our elected officials talk us to death and nothing gets done. Currently, Trump is demanding the Senate eliminate the legislative filibuster because of the unwillingness among Democrats and some Republicans to accept the Republican funding bill (also known as The One Big Beautiful Bill Act or OBBBA) and end the current shutdown that has led to, among other things, the absence of TSA workers at airports in the United States. According to a PBS News report, the filibuster, at its best, “encourages compromise and deal making.” Well, America, have I got a deal for you! I call it the Feel-It-Buster! And it is sure to drain the swamp like never before and get America working for the people again. Here are a few provisions:
If the majority of the American people are at risk of becoming cave dwelling, food scrounging nomads who can’t afford gas much less wheels, at risk of dying from preventable diseases with no health care, then I agree, we should have a long talk on the Senate floor. Bring on the Feel-It-Buster! Yabba-dabba-doo! Night time sharpens, Heightens each sensation Darkness stirs and wakes imagination Silently the senses Abandon their defenses… … listen to the music of the night (Music of the Night, Lyrics by Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe) Yesterday, the harsh winter gave an inch, and spring took a mile. Overnight, we went from the depths of winter to late spring. The temperature rose by 42 degrees! Folks were out and about in their shorts and tank tops. Where the bike path had been desolate, it was now teeming with joggers, walkers, bikers, and dogs on long leashes. Everyone was smiling. Even the dogs.
It was so good to be back outdoors, and to be free of coats and hats, boots and gloves. After a day outdoors, I found myself tiring early, and I headed to bed about 9:00 PM with the windows wide open. Despite my fatigue, I lay awake in bed for hours, the air alive with sounds, sounds that a winter night keeps to itself behind the cloak of darkness, closed windows, and insulating snow. I lay in my bed, listening to the quiet, whispered song of the ceiling fan circling overhead. Occasionally, the long silver chain jingled on the twirling air like a choir of tiny bells. A long train rumbled in the distance like a thundering bass drum. The building shook like a giant morocco. The train’s air horn accentuated the beat with a mighty vibrato. Cars whooshed down the four-lane highway at the end of my drive, nylon brushes against brass cymbals. Sirens screamed in the near-distance like blares from a horn while a helicopter hovered overhead with the steady chop-chop of its propeller. A soft breeze kept the mini blinds tapping a steady beat against the window frame. The night was a dark theater. The phantom of summer had returned. I listened in awe-filled silence as I welcomed back the music of the night! Mark Zuckerberg took the stand last week to testify in a lawsuit brought by grieving parents who believe their children were harmed by engagement with Meta’s social media platforms. Zuckerberg arrived at the courthouse still looking much like a teenage boy with his mop of curly brown hair. He seemed out of place in his grown-up clothes, a suit and tie. I watched this sober-faced man-boy, and I was reminded of images of young college-aged men on trial for the deaths of their fraternity brothers after a night of drunken hazing. Zuckerberg did have a good idea while he was still in college. Back in 2003, he seemed to understand the social needs of college students to connect, to be seen, heard, and liked. It wasn’t long before he realized that all people have these same social needs, and Facebook for the masses was launched. For most of us, connection remains the main reason we continue to use social media all of these years later. Zuckerberg launched his career at Facebook with the motto: Move fast and break things, a motto that has dominated the tech world. In 2014 he updated the motto to “Move fast with a stable infrastructure,” whatever that means. In any event, maybe it was too little too late. Move fast and break things was too deep in the DNA of the entire industry. And not just the tech industry, the contagion spread and created a pandemic that is apparent everywhere including our politics. These folks seem to have grown up with the belief that “We’re cool because we’re careless.” Think Facebook and the genocide in Myanmar, or Musk and DOGE. Move fast and break things is what a child freeing himself from the restraint and security of his mother’s arms might be thinking. Move fast and break things might be the motto of a wrecking crew not a builder, a jewel thief not the jeweler. Move fast and break things sounds like fun until it is time to clean up the debris field or until you cut off your own hands. When every norm is broken, lives can be destroyed, and they are not so easily put back together as the grieving parents who filed these lawsuits complain. It is not the first time Zuckerberg has been called to account. Many books have been written. Members of the press have confronted him. He has been called before Congress. Perhaps Zuckerberg feels too big to fail and so he has not heeded the warnings. Perhaps, like many powerful men, he believes the rules do not apply to him, or he deludes himself by believing that things are as he says they are because he says so. Or maybe he is incapable of empathy and through his social media empire, he destroys empathy in others. A business that is built on a model of scandalizing its patrons and promoting outrage will eventually become self-destructive. When you see the scale of the damage influenced or caused by social media, you realize the depravity. This model is not just breaking the rules of business; it is breaking people, breaking peace and order, breaking elections and democracy, breaking civilizations. A strong footing in reality is the foundation of mental health. Social media has stolen reality in order to sell advertising. Half of the country gets its news from social media where reporting is not balanced, fair or complete, where it is deliberately manipulated and sensationalized through disinformation in order to foster outrage, clicks, and sharing. It normalizes political fear and hatred and increases suspiciousness. It amplifies the demand for immediate answers which doesn’t allow experts time to do their work. This furthers misinformation and loss of confidence in science, truth, and expertise. Social media company owners cry “freedom,” to keep their malignant operations running, but what does that word “freedom" even mean when words are manipulated in such a predatory fashion? Research shows how easily our minds can be influenced and our choices and behavior swayed. All of this is well studied and applied by social media companies and marketers of every stripe. Social media is programmed to appeal to our reptilian brains—brains that react without concern for their young or for others. It makes people self-absorbed. Technology is causing children to be confused about what it means to be alive, to be a human being. It has changed the way we engage with others and work in groups. It amplifies our primal instincts of fear and aggression. As our machines get smarter and faster, we lose the higher functions of the mind like insight and empathy, functions that make us fully human and give us the capacity to anticipate and care about the consequences of our actions. There are many industries in which moving fast is critical: think EMTs, firefighters, ER doctors and surgeons, people who repair our power lines and sewer pipes in the midst of storms…It is possible to think fast, act quickly and still maintain the structure and safety of individuals and society. What most of us want is to live in a world filled with compassion not hate and conflict. We all want to feel inspired and optimistic not beaten and suspicious. We need hope not despair. We all want to be seen and heard, but the only way for society to survive is with shared truth based on facts and history. It is all coming to a head, Mark Zuckerberg, the speed, the greed, and the misdeeds. No kid goes off to college thinking he will kill a fellow student at a frat party. And that brilliant kid sitting in his dorm room at Harvard who came up with the idea to connect us surely didn’t start out with the intention to push teenagers to suicide or countries to genocide. You can do better than this. Our parents never encouraged us to move fast and break things, but they did often remind us to be careful of the company we keep. Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. -- Rumi Lately, I have been praying continuously and fervently. The state of the world frightens me. The growing scale of problems overwhelms me. And so, like Abraham Lincoln, each day I fall to my knees because I believe that I have nowhere else to go. On a recent morning, I began the day with my usual catalog of prayers when a thought took hold of me: what if God doesn’t answer prayers? Initially, the idea stunned me but quickly grew into a confident belief. As I remained still and quiet, a story from the Book of Genesis came to me: God saw that man was lonely, and God made a companion for the forlorn man. I meditated on that and began to entertain a question. What if that was the original response to prayer? And the once-and-for-all, forever answer? Man had a need he could not name, and he received a solution he could not have conceived. It was a solution birthed from the man’s own ribs, from a part of his being. The answer was a companion, the gift of someone like himself. Has God anticipated our needs? And having anticipated our needs has God created someone to help us meet each one of them? Could I be the answer to someone’s prayers? What if each of us lived with the belief that we contain the spark of the divine, the ability to answer prayers? What if each of us was raised not with the question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” But with the query: “Whose prayers will you answer today?” Might that be the response to the great existential question, “Why am I here?” And might it be the road back to paradise? I continue to convene with God each day. Like C.S. Lewis, I just can’t seem to help myself. It doesn’t change God, but I hope that it changes me. God saw that man was lonely. He made you someone’s valentine. Perhaps you have yet to meet, but someone is looking for you today. Someone needs you. Open your eyes and your heart. Answer someone’s prayers and believe that there is someone ready to answer yours.  After a splendid run at the top of the ratings, the American viewing audience has tired of What About the Other Guy. Responding to the changing tastes of its audience, WHY (We Hear You) Broadcasting Corporation has launched a hot new game show that blends America’s true crime fascination with the tremendous success of the lottery, honoring American’s love of danger and taking chances. The show is called Who Said? Name that Psychopath. Contestants will be offered quotes from famous psychopaths and asked to identify the correct notorious villain from a list of choices. Think you know a psychopath when you hear one? Let us be the judge of that! Join us for a round of Who Said? Name that Psychopath. Winners will receive our thoughts and prayers and an updated high-tech version of our very popular moral vacuum. Losers get to drink the Kool-Aid. The response choices are:
Here we go! Name that Psychopath! Who Said?
An Inside Job Walking in a large commercial parking lot, I see a food truck pull up to the curb with the words “Gangster Cheese” painted on the side. As the staff set up shop, preparing for the soon-to-arrive lunch crowd, I find myself wondering what “gangster cheese” might be. Some type of cheese with a lot of street cred? But the truck is painted black. The logo is shadowy figures dressed in trench coats with fedoras tipped below their brows—intimidating, old-time gangster images, not hip-hop stars and rappers. An employee sets up a sign that contains the menu: grilled cheese sandwiches. This doesn’t add up. To bring order to my mind, I want to stop and tell these cheese gangsters to change the name because I am pretty sure that a buttery grilled cheese sandwich is not the food of evil forces; it’s what’s for lunch in heaven. Before penicillin, it cured a lot of sick kids and made life worth living. But even in my state of mental confusion, I still have enough judgment to realize that asking a gangster of any kind to change their name would be a gamble, and it might end with me buried in concrete. I sleep on it. My rested mind remembers that before cheese kills you, it makes you an addict, clogging your arteries and sealing off your colon. Aha! These cheese gangsters don’t cut your heart out, they wait for it to explode. What a scheme! They take your money and let you die a slow death even as they keep you coming back for more. It’s the perfect crime--all the evidence is digested and flushed down the toilet. I guess of all the ways to die, death by buttery grilled cheese sandwiches is not so bad. It’s better than having your bones broken one-by-one. I decide to go undercover before drawing any final conclusions. I infiltrate some local cartels of cafeteria ladies and stay-at-home moms. In the process, I learn that this is a big operation that goes all the way to the top. It’s a syndicate too big for this little gumshoe, and so I wind up my investigation. The findings? A buttery grilled cheese sandwich is the original ecstasy, a recipe the gods intended for heaven. With the size of their operation and their many channels of distribution, I conclude that these cunning, cheese-trafficking gangsters must have someone on the inside! |
AuthorLilli-ann Buffin Archives
March 2026
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