Politics and peg people by Ruth Neuwald Falcon

I’ve been looking for words to share with you and Sunday morning my friend Lis — who I’ve known since she was sixteen and I was forty-five — gave me some:

My daughter and I have been painting peg people of our loved ones. She’s finishing up her Ruth. I’m working on one too, but my glasses technique needs some work.

It started because years ago I bought a custom version of our family from Etsy that we hang on the tree every year and this year we couldn’t find our youngest son, so we decided to make him. But it turns out when you buy supplies they aren’t just for one peg person. So then we had all these supplies. 😆

We are having a great time doing this! I’m finding it very therapeutic. It’s a wonderful way for us to focus on people we care about and not on all the other stuff out there.

I know how deeply Lis cares about “all the other stuff out there.”

Then there was the message in my in-box from Gabby Giffords.

I know something about overcoming obstacles. No doubt, we will experience some hard days the next four years…. But that doesn’t mean it’s time for us to give up.

And one from David Hogg, who became a gun control activist after surviving the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting.

The most important thing we can do is remain hopeful because without that nothing will change. I refuse to give up, I hope that you don’t either.

I’ve been staying away from most news coverage but when I saw that Anne Applebaum in had written about the ouster of Assad in The Atlantic, I thought it would be important for me to read. I was right.

Russia has deliberately backed or created regimes that have not merely sought to repress opponents but have also gone out of their way to demonstrate flagrant disregard for human rights and the rule of law, ideas that Putin claims belong to the past…

He wants to build a world in which his cruelty cannot be limited, in which he and his fellow dictators enjoy impunity, and in which no universal values exist, not even as aspirations.

Brutality is meant to inspire hopelessness. Ludicrous lies and cynical propaganda campaigns are meant to create apathy and nihilism. 

There is nothing worse than hopelessness, nothing more soul-destroying than pessimism, grief, and despair. The fall of a Russian- and Iranian-backed regime offers, suddenly, the possibility of change. The future might be different. And that possibility will inspire hope all around the world.

Including here.

What’s giving me hope now are the heart connections, new and old, that are creating a new community that will help us meet whatever is going to come. It won’t be pretty, but we won’t be alone.