At some point in our afternoon, backyard adventures, I got a splinter in my finger. As I was washing dishes I realized that it was there and asked Sam to take a look at it. He looked and said, “That’s pretty deep, it’s going to have to come to the surface.”
I looked down and thought about that. There is so much that this coming to the surface during this pandemic. We are reminded that of how many people are hanging on by a thread living paycheck to paycheck. We are seeing how many small businesses might close in the next six weeks. We see the lines at food pantries getting longer and longer and can’t help but be confronted by the truth of how many families are living in food insecurity.
While we may have been able to ignore the splinters in our society that are deeply embedded into our very makeup, the pandemic has brought them to the surface. We are not ok. We are deeply splintered. We are deeply divided. We are deeply steeped in inequality.
Now that we have seen the inequalities and splinters that exist, we have a choice to make: Are we going to try to get them out or let it continue to infect us?