David McElroy

Folks on the progressive left seem to see Joe Therrien’s story as a tragedy. I agree that it’s a tragedy, but for very different reasons than the ones laid out in the left-wing publication The Nation last week.

Therrien is a part of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Listen to his story and see if you can spot the tragic part.

Just a few years ago, Therrien had a full-time job as a drama teacher in a government-run elementary school in New York City. He was unhappy with the working conditions — too many students, not enough resources and lousy management — so he decided to go to graduate school instead. He spent the next three years studying his passion — puppetry — while he ran up $35,000 in debt.

After emerging from the University of Connecticut with a master’s degree in puppetry, he was apparently shocked to find that he couldn’t find a job. We all know that jobs for good puppeteers should be available pretty much anywhere, but the evil rich have dried up the market. Or something like that. Therrien says he couldn’t find a job, so he ended up applying for his old job at the NYC elementary school. As you might have heard, times are tough, so schools aren’t exactly creating new positions left and right, so he ended up taking a job as a full-time substitute teacher at his old school — at about half his former salary.

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In order to show how much they care, the folks in the White House have set up a website for people to make petitions about issues they care about. What the politicians didn’t count on was someone using their system to satirize how vapid and condescending the actual responses are.

Any sane and realistic person knows that the administration doesn’t care how many petitions you sign. (It’s not just this one, of course. No administration cares about petitions, contrary to what many people assume.) It’s only interested in how many votes you can deliver and how many dollars you can give.

For the rest of us, they’re just interested in placating us. They’ll pretend to listen. They’ll write boilerplate responses. They might even promise a pony sometimes. But it’s not going to change reality.

The White House petition system is for PR purposes, pure and simple. We all know that. And when politicians go through the motions of pretending to take us seriously, it’s condescending. So here’s a petition that I hope you’ll actually consider signing:

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It’s easy for me to get depressed about the state of things in this fallen world. Everywhere I look, there’s ugliness, ignorance and hatred. Those things are very real. But if all we see is the squalor in the world, we’re missing the love and beauty that were put all around us to experience. They’re very real, too.

I’ve seen evidence of the very bad and the very good this week, and I’m constantly trying to reconcile the two. It seems that the more you feel one of the extremes, the more you’re capable of experiencing the other extreme.

From talking to others, I suspect that I experience both extremes more strongly than most. The things that hurt me don’t just disappoint. They wound something really deeply, even if it’s something that wouldn’t affect others. I’ve never liked that about myself, but I suspect that if I didn’t feel so deeply about the hurtful things, I wouldn’t feel the beautiful things so strongly.

I started thinking about this Friday night as I drove west on I-20 in Birmingham just barely after sunset. I came over the top of a hill and suddenly had a vast open space ahead of me with hills in the distance. The fading sunset was a pinkish orange hanging just above the black of the hill contours.

It was breathtaking to me. It wasn’t just beautiful. It was something that touched me emotionally. For that moment, all the ugliness of the world was gone. All the problems of daily life were gone. I felt content, at peace and as though I was experiencing something God put in front of me — just for me.

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