Each morning, I wake up to two stories. One is loud and distressing, shrilly demanding attention. The other is quiet, gentle and calm. One is like being caught in a permanent winter. The other is like spring, rich with new life and hope.
The one like a never-ending winter storm is the jarring, clashing, coarse strut of the Trump administration—its fear-mongering, its gutting of the federal government, its demonizing immigrants and trans people and anyone who doesn’t provide lockstep MAGA approval, its gutting of the national economy in the name of a tariff fantasy, its threatening of international allies and cozying up to enemies, and its spouting of any number of off-kilter presidential whims and spasms.
If I turn my eyes away from all that noise and hubbub, it’s easy enough for me to find the story filled with spring-like warmth and flowering. Such as at any of the four McDonald’s restaurants in my Far North Side neighborhood.
Some people look down their nose at the fast-food giant, but let me tell you that the dining area of a McDonald’s is a place where community happens—where a version of the American dream happens—all day, every day.
The dining area of a McDonald’s is a place where community happens — where a version of the American dream happens — all day, every day.
Recently, a dark-skinned middle-aged man who had the look and accent of an African asked a guy at a nearby table, “Are you a citizen?” That guy, who looked Middle Eastern but, it turned out, was Mexican, said he was, and they started a conversation between their tables, trading notes about being Americans.
There is one dirty, ragged homeless man, relatively young, who frequently visits one McDonald’s where he eats when he has the money and sleeps when he needs to. The busy staff lets him get away with it for a while, but, eventually, one of the managers has to wake him up and send him on his way.
This happened the other day, and the manager was gentle in her approach and, as the man left, wished him luck, using his first name.
If you sit in one of these McDonald’s, you might overhear a gray-haired guy telling someone new the old story of his heart bypass surgery, or get bits and pieces of a conversation between a pastor and a member of her congregation on the meaning of a line from the Gospel of Mark, or see the nannies gather around a table with the children they care for, or fall into a conversation yourself with someone asking about the book you’re reading.
That happened to me, and the book I was reading was another example of the story of hope and spring—For Gaza’s Children: Black, Brown and Jewish Writers and Poets Speak Out.
Published by Third World Press on Chicago’s South Side, the largest and oldest Black press in the nation, it is a scream of protest against the oppression of Palestinians by those who have suffered oppression themselves, a cry from the heart against the destruction, dispossession and killing of children and civilian adults in the latest War on Gaza by Israel.
This is a book rooted in the humanity that all of us—everyone in the world—share regardless of borders. Each one of us is a flower that has a right to bloom.
And, speaking of blooming, nothing is as spring-like, nothing as life-giving, as watching young children, such as my three grandkids.
They are still at the start of their blooming. Watch Emma, nearly six, dancing to her own choreography in the family living room. Or her cousin Ulysses, nearly three, acting the role of teacher for a class of doting adults and “reading” them the classic book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?
But here is the image that I go to whenever the constant winter of fear and threat gets to be too much: It involves Emma’s brother Noah, who is two, and a video that his father took at pickup time at the daycare center.
Noah is at one end of a long corridor when he sees his father, and, with the widest smile in the world, he begins running at full speed toward him. About halfway, he stops to look in the window of a classroom door, waving frantically at those inside, and then he takes off again toward his father, smiling and giggling with utter joy.
At that moment, all is right in the world.
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