Easy Sunday: Cheer up.

      "I get up every morning feeling cynical about politics, but then I watch what's going on and realize I was not cynical enough."

My reflection upon finishing yesterday's post

Try to do good things. Don't give up.

A reflection on Lyn Hennion.

People who read yesterday's post learned that I had a low opinion of the Supreme Court. I said the Supreme Court was a purely political body, pretending to be fair umpires calling balls and strikes, but that this was a lie.

All the parsing of the law and precedent is window dressing. It is pretense. When it involves Trump, the Supreme Court is all politics all the time.

The game is rigged, I wrote. My attorney's brief, formatted with all their citations and footnotes, submitted per the Supreme Court's detailed rules for printing and binding amicus briefs -- all that work was irrelevant. I wrote that the Supreme Court decision on tariffs was based solely about how four Republican judges could hide their profound partisanship by denying Trump a win on this issue, while mollifying an unpredictable, emotionally unstable president by writing it so that he had workarounds. This decision was a public relations gambit.

I said it: The Supreme Court members are partisan hacks. The robes are a sham. Lady Justice's blindfold is a lie. People who think otherwise are naive. 

Yeah, that is a pretty cynical view of our present condition.

Then, yesterday afternoon, I attended a celebration-of-life event for Lyn Hennion.

Lyn seemed to me to have have been a genuinely good person. I knew her as a wholesaler-representative for Franklin Funds, then as a Financial Advisor for about 20 years for a rival firm, and for all of her adult life as an active board member for community institutions. She was a philanthropist, fundraiser, and cheerleader for them.

The event's speakers told funny, upbeat stories about how Lyn helped them and their organizations. She was a community builder. A Good Samaritan. She cared about everything, but especially early childhood education for the "itty-bitties," as she put it.

My big takeaway from the program was appreciation of Lyn personally. I reflected that it was a life well lived. I sat quietly with that idea for a couple of minutes after the meeting broke up. 

Lyn changed my mood and attitude. Lyn wasn't cynical. Of course the world is unfair, and misfortune is inevitable. The poor we will always have with us. No matter. Lyn rowed against that current. She kept tying to make things better. She kept trying to build community. 

There's a lot to be cynical about, but there is work to do that makes the world a little bit better. Do that work. Don't give up. 

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