I left the US in 1968 for a year of study abroad. It was a time of great duress here with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F Kennedy, as well as the riots of the Democratic convention in Chicago, and throughout that time the terrible conflict in Vietnam. Our country was filled with much that kept women and people of color from free and equal citizenship, where Lesbians and Gays were diagnosed as diseased and treated as criminals, in which the ecosystem was hardly even a concept, yet in which “better living through chemistry” didn’t even sound sinister. There was the US and USSR on a hair trigger alert for a nuclear Armageddon. Yet it was also a world with more rain forest, more wild habitat, more ozone layer, and many more species; and very few who were having to defend these things then. I learned that as the world gets worse, it also gets better.

Join us this Sunday to discover a word that can help us consider the past that we may choose a better future.