Thoughts and Prayers – Tom Finneran

Friday, July 31, 2020

Tom Finneran, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

Tom Finneran, former Speaker of the MA House of Representatives

It is the summer of our discontent.

Everyone is angry about something.

We cannot even get baseball right.

*Has there ever been anything as silly as cardboard cutouts in the stands and piped in crowd noise? This is the stuff of kindergarten class. The local nine is off to a very rough start, so perhaps the pretense that this is a contending team is every bit as silly as the cardboard cutout characters. Absolutely no one will mourn this team. In fact, the cardboard fans are likely to become season-long boobirds. Nonetheless, you should pray for this team, as you would for anyone in such pitiful circumstances. It’s only right that you give consolation to those who have been led by such a dubious fraud as Rob Manfred…….

*It is only a matter of time. The tragedy of the fatal shark attack on the woman in Maine will repeat itself, only next time it will be closer to home. When the lunacy of seal worship allows the federal government to decree that seals are an endangered species, while there are more than fifty thousand of them cluttered on Cape beaches, it is pretty clear that we have lost any semblance of sanity. When the taxpaying public is told that the seals were here first and that taxpayers’ enjoyment of the shore is not even a secondary concern, that’s when you discern that we are not well served. America’s passive surrender to poop-machine Canada geese and to poop-machine seals is not a good sign of civic health. Might we have a disciplined and timely harassment of the seals before the sharks tally another human being? And might we pray for the woman in Maine, whose final moments in those cold dark waters must have been sheer terror?

*John Lewis did it right. He was brave, he was strong, he was moral, and he was right. He talked of America’s shame and the need for a national reckoning on civil rights. From his march across the Pettus Bridge to his leadership in the United States Congress, he showed courtesy and courage, steel and heart, brains and soul. He seemed to be a kind and gentle man, yet his toughness was forged at the lunch counters, under the truncheons, and in the jails of the deep South. He took the moral course as his compass and he guided much of America from cold indifference to active enthusiasm for full civil rights. His walk from Selma to Montgomery is the stuff of legend. Might it long be taught in America’s schools.

May he rest in peace and may his memory seed America and the world with righteous leadership.