I went to a play two weeks back, and it was just beautiful. No, seriously, it was just “Beautiful”, the Broadway-in-Hawai`i version of the Carole King story. Attendees surely knew of King’s artistry through her multi-million selling “Tapestry” album (1971), but many were no doubt stunned to learn of the lengthy list of monster hits that King and her Brill Building cohorts wrote for others. King is considered the most successful pop female songwriter of the 20th century with 118 written or co-written songs that charted, and “Beautiful” provided two-plus hours of pure joy at the Blaisdell Concert Hall.
But this story gets even more beautiful. 2,000 people sitting side by side without anybody getting in anybody’s face about what they were or were not wearing on their face. It was like fantasyland, or at least 2019. Most concertgoers were respectful of the “request” to keep one’s mask on, leading one to perhaps sense that we’ve entered a calmer, gentler moment.
BA.2 Omicron subvariant cases cause concern (“BA” must stand for “Bad Attitude”, as this stealth stinker proliferates), but many people still smartly appreciate sensible safety measures learned and practiced over the past 750 days; so maybe now we can look forward to things finally staying stable, and maybe even getting beautiful.
Sure, there remain many post-pandemic issues and items to deal with, but perhaps we can now focus on fixing things without having to worry so much about fixing one another. This is not to suggest that PTSD and other post-COVID realities will just drift away, but should cooler heads prevail, maybe we can rationalize that working together with empathy to resolve issues beats going into self-serving bubbles, playing tribal games, or resorting to “gotcha” at the expense of making things better for all.
While expecting little of value from the self-focused flotsam and jetsam working (not) in our nation’s capital, we can now pro-actively get back to putting our (big picture) island home in order as we put our personal island homes in order. The willpower appears to be there; the funds are certainly there (for now). How about a couple of years of transition, breakthroughs and small wins, followed by bigger celebrations?
How about we all start singing from a songbook of accomplishments and successes; great things can happen when no one cares who gets the credit? Doing that would really be beautiful.
Think about it…