SISYPHEAN TASKS

     In school, at one time or another, we all read the tale of the Sisyphean task, of being doomed to a hopeless task for all eternity, be it the rolling of a huge rock uphill only to see it roll back down again, or, it seems, having humankind finally come to terms with what is right and proper and what is not.
     Why, in the year 2019, are we still fighting battles that appeared to have been won before. Why was a society that appeared to be over the brink already of accepting 'others', of accepting LGBTQ, of accepting the idea of transgender, of accepting , finally, the fact that women are imperative to the functioning and improvement of the world, that ability, capability, honesty, knowledge - all were required in order to serve the people, be it in government, the judiciary, or wherever they chose to contribute, why has this society gone backwards, esposed the hatred once more, rushed headlong into the faults of yesterday and trampled on the progress we had made?
     Yesterday I saw two productons that brought this point home. First we attended a most wonderful production of Fiddler on the Roof at the Broward Center. The stagecraft and presentation were wonderful, if somewhat different at times from the traditional Fiddler presentation, but one  truly fixed the message of the play. It opened with 'Tevya', not yet presented, reading an introductory paragraph while dressed in modern clothing. Soon enough, the outer layer was discarded and we were back in Anatevka of old, totally immersed in "Tradition" and all that followed.
     The second was a CD of the movie "Boy Erased", a shocking presentation of the farce, of the hypocrisy among so callled people of G-d, of faith, who are willing to be violent, to throw away their children, to do harm all in the name of 'healing' them from the sin of homosexuality. It was not blood and gore that made one tremble but rather the understated but overly brutal methodology and the wonder why the hell we had to be making a movie like this today!
     In fact, why is it that the hate, the animosity, the baseless shredding of humanity is still so much a part of us. At the end of Fiddler, the modern dressed narrator, Tevya of old, came back on stage as the Jews of Anatevka were walking once more away from a home from where they had been expelled, and touched the shoulder of the fiddler, the one on the roof. Past and present touching, the circle still unbroken, and this is not a good unbroken circle at all.
     So why does it appear to me that the task of being human and humane, of being openly accepting of people who are not clones of oneself, is the modern day Sisyphean task. Will we forever have to deal with this? Why are Jews being killed once more - in the streets of our own nation and as they fight against the rising tide of anti Semitism again in the countries of Europe where there has been an ingrained vein of anti Semitism since time began. Why do haters, proponents of violence, have the nerve to apear in public, be it in Charlottesville or at a KKK rally planned in Dayton for May 25. Why is this hatred still here?!
     These biases, these murderous hatreds, for they are murderous, are our modern day Sisyphean tasks, and we must break that old, that unbroken circle. That effort starts in two places - within oneslf, or as Michael Jackson sang, with the man in the mirror, and with the heads of government. But when one has a head who apparently supports this type of behavior, this hateful thinking, by excusing it, by calling them "fine people", by speaking and  ranting with and about hatred of brown people, of accusing people seeking haven, just as our ancestors or even ourselves did, of being "rapists, murderers, drug cartel and gang members", well, what do the young in our society learn and in fact, what do weak and hateful people , adults in society learn?
     Can we complete our task? Can we roll these awful hatreds not up a hill, but down the hill and bury it deep within the earth or under the fathomless depths of the oceans, never to rise again? If we do not, if we continue to allow these words of hate to be spoken, to be then acted upon, then woe upon us, for again, it can never be emphasized enough, hateful words lead to hateful deeds lead to hate filled murders and genocide. Why do we even have to worry about genocide in 2019 and yet we do. Shame on us. Shame on our leaders. Shame on humanity. Time to do the right thing. For once and forever.