‘The pieces come together because a lot is broken’

Your state has two senators who may or may not give a rat’s whisker about your interests or about the interests of people like you (most senators don’t). But even if you don’t live in Massachusetts, you’ve got at least one senator who does represent you — and she’s pretty tough, too:

And it’s not just one problem. It’s one after another after another. They’ve been hit with flat wages or even slightly declining wages. And all the core expenses of being middle class, of housing, of healthcare, of what it costs to keep a child in daycare or send a kid to college, to medical care. All of those costs have shot through the roof. That has put a squeeze on these families. They sent as many people as they could into the workforce, in two-parent families, they sent both Mom and Dad or both Moms into the workforce, but it still wasn’t enough. They turned to debt and then they were targeted by a credit industry that figured out you could make huge profits from lending to people who were already in a financial squeeze. And so what’s happened is that America’s middle class has just been under this enormous pressure, and parts of it are beginning to break apart. Our once steady, solid, almost dull middle class, that was the idea. We were so sure it would always be there. Pieces are starting to break away. Families can no longer say to their kids, “you’re going to do better than I did.” And that’s what it is we have to attack.

… The question is what are we going to do going forward? We have to outline our priorities and we have to be willing to get in there and fight for them. And that’s what all of this is about. It’s about how we fight for our college kids, the ones who are trying to get an education and being crushed by student loan debt. It’s about how we fight for seniors to protect Social Security and to help people get more money into retirement savings. And in this particular case with this bill, it’s how we fight for people who have been hit with one economic blow or another and are out there trying to compete in the job market and just want a level playing field. You’re right, the pieces come together because a lot is broken, and it’s going to take a lot of pieces to get it fixed again.

“The pieces come together because a lot is broken” is excellent theology.

It’s easy to focus on the negative — “a lot is broken” and there’s so much to do. But this is also where hope can be found — there’s so much to do and, therefore, there’s so much that can be done.

Put pieces back together. Any pieces. Whichever pieces you are inspired, or driven, or called or required to work on. Putting those pieces back together helps restore the whole. It’s all connected. Seek to mend.