Alderperson Alex Schultz’s Invocation At 01/19/2022 Common Council Meeting – “What should I do with all this anger [about the pandemic] and how do I channel it into something positive and something productive?”

I apologize for the lateness in getting this Alderperson invocation video posted. This is from the 01/19/2022 Common Council meeting. Before viewing it, you may benefit from watching this clip from the movie “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles” which Alderperson Schultz references: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSUgqLI88OY

Mayor Woodford: Tonight’s invocation will be delivered by Alderperson Schultz.

Alderperson Schultz: Thank you, Chair. Can everybody hear me?

Mayor Woodford: We can hear you.

Alderperson Schultz: Okay, good. Welcome to 2022. I deliver that line like John Candy in “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles” because I think it’s apropos to where we find ourselves in our collective pandemic journey. In these days, some days it seems like a little comic relief is about all the relief we can find. We’ve endured so many unexpected twists and turns to get where we are now. We’re certainly isn’t where we wanted to be entering 3 year of this irrepressible virus and still staring into oncoming traffic with the devil at our side, accepting the enormity of just how far we may still have to go.

Dealing with this pandemic is a little like cruising down the highway in a burned out LeBaron. It’s all at once comical and incredibly tragic, and most days it feels like we’re still “Going the wrong way!”

Even reflecting on 2021 and 2020 before it for me is a dangerous exercise ’cause there are just so many awful things that happened that are beyond my control, that even upon reflection I still get upset and even angry about, leaving me with a lot of unresolved frustration.

And so here we are just a couple weeks into this new year lugging around an enormous trunk of dirty laundry from the last, like so many useless shower curtain rings, while dealing with this new normal–you know the one that, this year already includes deadly extreme weather events, antisemitic hostage standoffs, what seems an inevitable repeat invasion of the Ukraine, and of course the current tsunamic wave of Omicron cases across the country. And I’m sure a lot of you feel the same frustration and anger and I have to ask myself, like maybe you, what should I do with all this anger and how do I channel it into something positive and something productive?

Recently, I may have found some guidance on another frustrating reality of our new normal and that’s the unfettered social media and what it brings to the forefront, that occasionally produce profound reflections like this one. I’d attribute the author but I couldn’t find the name, and so I’ll just call it “Anger”.

Anger will not help me.
Stating my disgust is about me
Feeling expressed.
Hating makes me no better
Then the murder-shy one moment.
I could hold my wokeness high
Over others perhaps
Beat them down with words
In a fight I know I’ll walk away from.
We could unfriend each other
Scream pretend I understand.
My anger helps no one.
It’s actually a holdover from when I was being raised
To be the one we now condemn which is
Why I can’t bring myself to raise my fist to my side and strike another
To bring his hatred to my heart and harm another.
And though I judge not if you do, I find
To bring his tongue to my lips
Even speaking words of ill
Brings my heart quickly to a place
Where my solution equals his.
Who am I angry at?
Angry am I at who?
Am I who am angry at?
And what can we do with that?
Except to rearrange some words
So maybe voices that ain’t been heard
Finally get heard.
And not the last word
But the first
And the third
And the fourth
And the sixth
Until the table is big enough to seat all of us.
But I’m already seated
So, I’ll stop by preaching
Leave him to his anger
Leave her to her judgement
And I’ll go where the [something] needs stacking
Where the hammer and the nail is waiting.
I’m going where the shovel lay and putting on my work gloves
Rolling up my sleeves.
The efforts of my yesterday I multiplied by three
Quite literally
Why?
Because my actions are about others
While my words are about me
While anger is my prison service
Has always set me free.
So never mind my opinion on what we all just saw
For there is but one answer
And this impression says it all.
And yes, oddly enough, the radio still works.