Dear Connor
“Dear Connor” is a collection of essays written for Connor Cunningham by his grandmother, Linda Grist Cunningham. The essays are her construct for making sense of the unraveling American community. Connor may never read them but they help her distill solutions from the cacophony that passes for discourse as America enters its crisis turning.
Dear Connor | The day the young ones took charge
History will remember the march as the coming-to-power of Xers and Millennials. Though there were aging baby boomers aplenty in the crowd and at the microphones, the marches around the world saw these elders step aside to open the way for younger women.
Dear Connor: Breaking the loop of endless despair
The 2016 presidential election will, on hindsight, be recognized as the precursor to the catalyst that ignites the transformation of America from fragmented, angry and disillusioned into cohesive, collaborative and powerful. America will move away from six decades of tearing down to four decades of building up and then we’ll start the process over.
Dear Connor: There’s no shaking off the coal dust
We will draw the line at the hard-core wingnuts at the fringes. I’m not inviting willful haters to my table. They’re not welcome. Period. We need to do whatever we have to to keep the haters corralled. And we must recognize there’s such a thing as hate born of unknowing.
Dear Connor: Hang on; the mess is almost over
Every 80-85 years, we enter this final generational shift that culminates in what can only be understood as a conflagration that burns off the accumulated mess and re-positions us for growth.
Dear Connor: How to marginalize the haters
Not all the -ists and -isms are haters. Not all the tacky and tasteless are haters. Most are just unwitting products of ignorance. We’re teachable. If we work at overcoming our ignorance, if we work on expanding our understanding, we don’t do as many bad things to each other. We get a whole lot closer to living by the Golden Rule.