Happy Easter

A bit late, we know, but we’ve been having a hard time getting in the right Easter mood this year

, what with jackboot-happy Gauleiters goose-stepping all over our country fining Christians for celebrating Easter in their cars with their windows rolled up, exposing absolutely nobody to any sort of risk.

At least we won’t have to worry about those Blue Nazis similarly pissing on First Amendment rights when Ramadan rolls around. Prove us wrong. We’d love to be wrong for once.

Then again, we were wrong to not get in the mood, so we guess that we’ve already been proven wrong. Because we were so tied up in our fury about what’s going on that we forgot to celebrate the most hopeful message of all in a time when hope is vilified and shouted down by a chorus of doomsayers.

What could we possibly need more in these times of mass hysteria and fear than the message of Resurrection? Or the message of Passover, the message of survival against all odds?

So yes, we were wrong to forget about those, even if it was only temporarily.

We’ll get through this, of course we will. We’ve gotten through far worse too many times to count, not only this country but the countries of our ancestors, wherever we may come from.

Have faith, faith in whatever you believe in, it doesn’t matter, all that matters is the faith and conviction that this is just another stumbling block.

All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.

Hopefully we will remember that the next time. Because there will be a next time. And hopefully we WON’T respond like idiots then and decide to saw off our legs to cure a hangnail.

But no matter what may come to be, we WILL get over this.

As long as we have faith. Faith that we will continue to do what’s right above what’s convenient, that we’ll continue to keep our calm and we will never, EVER, forget who and what we are, no matter what the price for remembering that may be.

Because if we forget that, then it doesn’t matter how long we lived, it won’t matter that we lived at all.

Let this be my message here, no matter what your faith, even if you don’t believe you have any faith at all:

We humans are a hardy bunch. We’ve been around for a looooong time, and we’ll be around for a long time to come. We’re really, really hard to kill. We go through shit, shit that would have wiped out lesser species and has wiped out lesser species, yet we’re still standing.

The only times we’ve really been in danger was when we lost our heads, when we thought ourselves immortal, when we felt that our nows were vastly more important than any of our possible tomorrows.

Let’s not lose sight of that. And let us also not lose sight of the fact that a life lived well, however short it might be, is still better than a life lived poorly. On your knees, enslaved by your own fears, constantly worrying about the inevitability of death.

As one of my favorite professors back in med schools used to say: “Add life to years, not years to life.” Life ends. It always does. Nobody gets out alive. Make sure you get the most of it, because you only get one shot.

Thatisall.