Reasons To Be Cheerful · 13 hours ago

What Dementia Taught Me About Living Through a Callous Time

Caring for her father through dementia, writer Courtney E. Martin discovered something she hadn't expected: that tending to a person in decline - scream-singing Tom Petty through his late-day confusion, letting him have her ice cream cone - made her family both softer and more resilient. When a Japanese family at a local park welcomed her unkempt, disoriented father to their picnic "as if he were a long lost relative," she recognized in that small gesture the same quiet force she sees threading through a fractured country. Martin draws a searching parallel between her father's deteriorating mind and a nation that has grown callous, arguing that beneath both kinds of deterioration, something else is also happening - neighbors watching out for the vulnerable, young people planting gardens in violent neighborhoods, communities gathering across lines of faith and politics. She finds her way to economist E.F. Schumacher's half-century-old reminder that "small is beautiful," not as retreat from systemic struggle, but as its necessary companion. What the piece ultimately offers is a way of holding two truths at once: that the harm is real and demands fierce attention, and that the fabric of human care - woven in backyards and park picnics and Minneapolis solidarity marches - is also real, and just as worthy of our gaze.