THANKFUL FRIDAY

For the last few weeks, my Instagram and Facebook feeds have been filled with pictures of graduations. I have scrolled through pictures of old high school friends celebrating their child’s graduation from high school, some even from college. There is a woman in the blogging community who I have followed since her oldest was a baby and she just this week posted pictures of that baby graduating high school. My heart swelled up for the young man and if I could do so without making it weird, I’d reach out and tell that woman she’s doing an amazing job at parenting.

The Saturday after Quinn’s graduation, Traci and I were floating in the pool conversing on how hard it is to encourage young people to do anything right now. This was not a complaint about young people today or rant of “in my time…” We both agreed that it is so hard to encourage young people because of the dumpster fire of a world we’re sending them into. We’re telling them to go to college so they can get a good job when so many of those jobs require so much more than a college degree. We’re sending them out there with our visions of the American dream of having a good job with health benefits and home ownership when the average cost of a home is unaffordable. Between the effects that climate change is having on food sources and human displacement, plagues, hate crimes and book bans, this world looks a little bit more like the dystopian fantasy worlds of Octavia Butler every day. It’s real difficult to tell a kid to be true to themselves when governments are making it illegal for them to do that.

People really struggle with the concept of inclusion and keep confusing it with indoctrination.

I recently finished watching A Small Light, which tells the story of Miep Gies and the role she played in helping to hide the Frank’s from the Nazis during the occupation of Amsterdam. Miep and her husband Jan played vital roles in not only hiding the Franks, but in smuggling Jewish children out of the city and into safe foster homes. We all know what happens to the Franks in this story. Otto Frank was the only survivor. One of the things that truly spoke to me in this story was how Miep continuously under played her role in saving the people she saved. In her mind, all she did was a keep a secret, but the reality is she kept a secret and managed to procure food for eight people with rations all while avoiding the gestapo. Years later, when she would speak to groups of her experience and the Franks, she would end her talk with this:

But even an ordinary secretary or a housewife or a teenager can, within their own small ways, turn on a small light in a dark room. -Miep Gies

In spite of how sad and depressing it was to watch this series, it gave me hope. The rise in hate crimes and government bans on anyone not cis-white is evidence that history tends to repeat itself. If and when the time comes, I am prepared to hide and keep people safe, but in the meantime, I am grateful for the sea of new graduates that I see in my social media feeds. Because in each one of them, I see their potential. I can see them thriving and succeeding. I can see them doing more than turning on a small light. I can see them turning on so many lights, making a room so bright we all have to squint at the magnificence of it. Now, this is not to say that we should just dump all the work onto theses young people. Far from it. What I am saying is that it is nice to have a new wave of help in flipping on some light switches.