Beauty and the Bee

Straight from a dog-eared paperback perched on the corner of my coffee table for years came this kernel of wisdom—sometimes you just have to pick at it—one of many from the mouths of babes, a single one on every page. Clear-headed advice from a child seems appropriate just now, as there are a few grown-up scabs I can’t seem to leave alone. But humankind collectively can’t either, as anybody with a pulse knows too well. I have no idea what happened to that little book, but this is the one piece of insight from it that stuck with me; everybody in the world needs a copy.

Archie Bunker’s theme song is a comically tragic scab I’ve been picking at for a while, playing it in my head on continuous loop for several days. Archie and Edith Bunker—America’s perfectly flawed couple, with their perfectly flawed family. A lot of it was lost on me when the show was new, more meaningful as I aged a little and understood the upshot of it all. Everybody knows Archie and Edith, and we’re probably related to them—every single one of us. (Hat tip to the late Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton for their spot-on portrayals.) We need to be honest about that.

Here’s another one I can’t seem to leave alone lately: messages of divisiveness coming from every angle, sometimes buried in language that masquerades as unifying, and even in the words of people who are supposed to lead us. Shame on anybody who knowingly fans the awful flames of what’s happening on our streets right now.

I submit we’re in big trouble if we can’t figure out how to celebrate our differences and rejoice in the things (far more of them) that unite us, and soon. We’re still light-years away from colorblindness, with dystopic rancor looming on the horizon, it seems, as far as the eye can see. At least, this is what the media would have us believe. The whole truth is anybody’s guess, I don’t care where you turn for news.

I have no answers, but a backward-looking approach seems destined to fail—the good old days never existed, as surely as there is no paradise now. My simple (and maybe simplistic) hope for everybody in the world continues to be this: to surround yourself with as much beauty as you can, while you can; to find somebody who needs a friend and be a friend; to treat everybody you meet the way you want to be treated; and to use common sense. I’m still picking at it.

Poor Archie and Edith—you can never go home.

But why on earth would you want to?

Those Were the Days (abridged), by Lee Adams

Boy the way Glenn Miller played
Songs that made the Hit Parade
Guys like us we had it made
Those were the days.
And you knew who you were then
Girls were girl and men were men
Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again
Didn’t need no welfare state
Everybody pulled his weight
Gee our old LaSalle ran great
Those were the days!