Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Past sins? Past poor performance? That is good news. It means we correct mistakes and do better. We have hope for our future.

Good News:

• When we fixed things, we broke things
• When we changed things, we had unintended, bad consequences.
• We wasted money.
• We wasted time.
• We treated on another badly.
• We incarcerated the wrong persons.
• We seated some persons in the back of the bus.
• We only allowed some persons to vote.

This list could continue. This list started with a few local things that some of us did on projects at work. This listed ventured into a few things that we did as a nation and a culture.

Notice the past tense of the verbs. These things happened in the past. WE DID THESE THINGS in the PAST. Somewhere in time, we corrected these things. WE CORRECTED OURSELVES.

We showed the capacity to recognize and correct our mistakes. We still have that capacity. Hence, we have hope for our future.