Today was a good day. Jane and I volunteered as “Fan Ambassadors” at the American Express golf tournament in La Quinta. I got assigned to be greeter/traffic control for people arriving. I made a decision that I was going to greet every person as warmly as I could. “Welcome!” “Good morning!” “Have a great day!” “Can I take your picture by the Amex sign?” It wasn’t hard, and I know it’s not much, but it made me feel like I was doing my part to combat the evil in our country right now. I was rewarded 100x people smiled at me, thanked me, told me to have a nice day too. One person called me “Jolly” I don’t think I have ever been called jolly in my life! To whoever told me that I looked “knowledgeable” I’m forever in your debt LOL!

Some people stopped and engaged a bit more and expressed support and sympathy for the people of Minnesota when I told them that was where I was from.

Normally being an extrovert would exhaust me, but today it filled me with a bit of hope and joy.

Before our shift at the AMEX we attended church via zoom with our entire family. Our daughter was singing. “Sunday I’m singing in church and the theme is joy as resistance. I’ll be singing Blackbird by The Beatles, The Joke by Brandi Carlile and an Irish folk tune called The Parting Glass”

I don’t think I had ever heard “The Joke” before, but afterward I was practicing what their minister termed “Kleenex ministry”. This was a very moving service! Their pastor had participated in a clergy action at the Minneapolis airport Friday and was arrested (and released) as part of a peaceful protest against ICE and their unbelievable brutality toward the citizens of Minnesota. There were over 700 clergy from around the country and they were told to limit it to 100!

At the end of the service they shared a poem by Andrea Gibson:

“Picasso said he’d paint with his own wet tongue on the dusty floor of a jail cell if he had to. We have to create. It is the only thing louder than destruction. It’s the only chance the bars are gonna break, our hands full of color reaching towards the sky, a brush stroke in the dark. It is not too late. That starry night is not yet dry.”

So to all of you on micro.blog, or wherever you read this, you are creators, you are artists, and photographers, and software developers, and entrepreneurs, and writers, and bloggers… Please keep creating! Create stuff that inspires and helps people!

I’m going to use this as inspiration to create as a form of protest until Trump is out of office and ICE is not terrorizing citizens. I hope you all will do likewise.

Oh, and please call or write your elected representatives and tell them that what is happening in Minneapolis is unacceptable!

Have a Great Day!!