2 postcards

I’ve done a fair amount of travelling during my life. I’ve been to some beautiful cities as well as some downright ugly ones. During one such sojourn to a city suffering from an acute bout of urban blight I made my way over to a postcard stand to see what they have. I was curious to see what kind of marketing genius could repackage this city in a way that was postcard worthy. I noticed that all the pictures were of the city either under a blanket of snow or at night. It was simply brilliant. Snow has this way of covering blight and making everything look peaceful. And in the night you have control over what gets illuminated and what remains in the dark.

Many communities have a hard time facing blight in their midst. They fail to wrap their minds around scandals in their midsts. So rather than face and fight the issues they resort to one of theses two methods.

1. The snow method. Simply cover over the problems with a blanket of white snow and pretend they’re not there.

2. The night method. A common knee jerk reaction one hears when confronted with a serious issue is “but..but look at all the chessed we do..look at Bikur Cholim and Chaverim..etc”.
In other words, illuminate where you want my eye to go.

But..snow tends to melt, come springtime, exposing the corpses hidden beneath.

And the sun always rises in the morning.

There’s no shame in having problems. The shame is when people don’t confront them.




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