To Brave the Hope

The blue tag swirled down the streetlight pole like a sloppy signature, which was exactly what it was. I hadn't noticed it before and had no idea how long it had been there. Knowing me and my sometimes marginal peripheral awareness, it could've been there for weeks, even though the streetlight was directly in front of our house.

The Mama (what I lovingly call my wife) was delivering a Kidpower workshop that morning and our daughters and me had just finished a packed morning of soccer and the grocery store.

After unloading the groceries, I filled a bucket with soap and water and a new scrubbing sponge intent on cleaning up the graffiti. Before I went outside with the bucket, I told my daughters what I was going to do.

"Girls, I'm going to clean off the poll out front, okay?"

"Why?" Beatrice asked.

"Because someone painted on it when they shouldn't have. It's called graffiti and I want to clean it up."

"Okay," Beatrice said. Bryce was too engrossed in her iPad to comment.

"That's very helpful of you, Dad," Bea added.

I smiled. "Why, thank you, Bea."

"You're welcome."

It was a glorious day outside, a warm fall day bathed in cerulean blue sky. Heavenly even, like a day from the Albert Brooks and Meryl Streep comedy Defending Your Life, where everyday was 72 degrees, there were all-you-can-eat buffets where you'd never gain weight, bowling alleys, comedy clubs and more. When in fact, this was purgatory in the movie, the weigh station to heaven and hell.

I conjured the silly 1991 rom-com because the world had become more violently absurd than ever. A bizzaro pre-apocalyptic world where the super heroes aren't so super anymore, much less heroes. A disrespectful world where others deface and tag in the name of marking property that'll never be theirs. A wag-the-dog world teetering on the edge of civil wars where fake news is real and real news is fake. A world full of splintered agendas and raging biases where our leaders compromise principles and laws and bastardized religion for partisan short-term gains. A world where the worst inside all of us is celebrated because an angry few feel they've been legitimately oppressed as others had truly been for hundreds of years. And a world where violence against women and sexual assault are compartmentalized, rationalized and diminished in the face of overwhelming bittersweet awareness.

All this swirled inside me while I scrubbed the blue tag off the pole. Except that it wasn't coming off. At all. I even scraped at it with a putty knife and nothing. I started sweating and decided to try window cleaner on it. Still nothing. We didn't have anything else stronger, so I stood helpless starting at the pole. A neighbor drove by and then stopped in front of our driveway.

She asked what was going on and I explained the graffiti and that I couldn't get it off. She said they had some stronger "goo off" stuff back at the house and that I could use it. A few minutes after she drove away, another two neighbors were walking back from the nearby farmer's market. They too had some stronger "goo off" stuff and went to retrieve it.

Once I applied the stuff with steel wool the blue tag came right off. Like magic. After that I helped our neighbor remove more graffiti from a one-way sign on our street.

When the Mama got home from her workshop, I told her about the blue tag I found and that I cleaned it off.

"Thank you, Sweetie," she said.

"I only just noticed it this morning. How long had it been there on the pole?" I asked, already knowing the answer.

"For at least I week. I was going to tell you about it."

A week, I thought. It could've been months for all I knew.

Sigh.

I know there will be more graffiti tags on streetlight poles and one-way signs. And I know we'll always be able to clean them off. But it's gotten harder to take the high road beyond the graffiti when the low road is so riddled with trolls and power predators these days.

When I shared that sentiment online a few days before the blue tag cleaning, a friend of mine answered:

Stay positive Kevin, people love that about you.

I smiled as I thought about it. I am positive most of the time. I am hopeful most of the time. But I'm even more thankful for the fact that there are many of us who are willing to take the high road, to remain positive, to make a difference regardless of our differences by taking action for the better however incremental or big, to ultimately prevent further social injustice and the literal moral unmooring of America.

I'm thankful for my wife who inspires me daily to brave the hope and put it in action, and my daughters as well who fuel my hope for the future. And I'm thankful for family and friends who inspire the same, that there is light and love and so many more of us willing to embody them both.

Right on and amen. Bring on that high road, please. Happy Thanksgiving everyone.