It’s freezing cold here in Chicago, even colder than freezing cold, as a matter of fact, at 6 F/-14 C, but wildly sunny in that taunting, January way. The sun is there but it’s not going to help us out.
Join the club.
Today is the day honoring Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., though it seems google isn’t marking it this year with a doodle. Hmm. I’ve noticed a big change in the doodles. Very telling.
Anyway, this is going to be a bit of long way around, but I’ve been watching the Punky Brewster reboot or continuation or whatever you want to call a show that joins the characters in present day, with original actors. It aired in 2020 or 2021, I’m not sure which, I had no idea it even happened until popped into a random string of suggestions on Peacock.
What I remember of the show is what they brought back: Punky; her best friend Cherie; a golden retriever. And it opens with a tribute to Henry, whose actor, I believe, passed away.
If you don’t know the show, Punky is essentially a runaway foster kid bachelor and photographer Henry takes in. Her best friend was being raised by her grandmother in the same building. They were kind of invisible but relatable kids, it was a breakaway from the nuclear families that were staunchly that way even if they weren’t.
As an adult, Punky is a recently divorced mom with one biological kid and 2 adopted kids, who are themselves biological brothers. Cherie is still her best friend, is a social worker and is dating a woman.
She urges Punky to take in a little girl who reminds her of herself, and there’s the show, edges rounded for sitcom palatability.
There are some truly solid laughs thus far, I haven’t quite finished the whole season, but it makes me sad, watching it. There is a cold stone sitting somewhere in my gut at the casual normalcy of everything within the sitcom parameters.
It’s like peering into another universe. The one we should have had, the one we nearly had, the one we had for four calm, peaceful years before people threw it away in exchange for…this.
I want to live in that world.
That world is gone.
That world never fully came to be.
We all know the “I Have a Dream” speech. I still get chills if I think about it, I don’t even have to hear it or read it.
But it is the ending of the speech, which once felt so close, which once rang in my ears not only as a challenge, but as a promise, that weaves itself into that frozen mass weighing heavily on my soul:
And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last.
It sounds silly to say this about a recycled sitcom, but that show feels like a tiny glimpse into that world we deserve, that world we should be fighting for against this endless polluted torrent of hate.
Instead it seems more like a tiny leaf, fallen far before its time, being swept away.
The work is not harder than it’s ever been, now. The risks are not greater, because there has always lurked that ultimate cost that so many have already paid.
But maybe we need to acknowledge that sense of loss for coming so very, very close, only for hate to win out in the end.
At least.
That round.
Then let us not forget another line from that same speech: “We will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.”
And maybe that, precisely that, is that stone I feel imaging what we could have.
Not sadness.
Immovable, indestructible hope.
Have a wonderful, reflective Monday.
A Bit to Read 
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