Sunday Paper

Good ol' Sunday coffee & paper

In case you did not notice, today's high schoolers were all born in the twenty first century.

Boy is it easy to think that we are a millennium apart.

How much more can be said about the "millennial generation?"

Luckily for them, their story is largely still unwritten.

If, however, you look at the stories being written day by day, it is enough to give at least this rambler some pause.

Sitting here in a coffee shop, attempting to put in yet more hours of work this week, I took the time to pick up an LA Times that was sitting on the table.

With nostalgia over the high school, LA Times-Award-winning, journalism years I flipped immediately to the second page.

Jan Ewell¹had told us usually the juicy stuff is on the inside flap of the page, where people are usually too lazy to venture to.

Here is a summary of headline-worthy newsbits²

• Chinese leaders plan how to rally their economy, step back corruption reform
• Exxon Mobil screwed the icecaps and coastal cities to pad their pockets
• Allegedly drunk driving woman kills 4
• Obama agrees with majority of Americans that standardized testing is stupid
• Naval academy brings back celestial navigation because hackers

Then I logged in to my laptop, and the first thing I saw pop on my Outlook was my Al Jazeera and KPCC news feeds.  Here is more from this past week:

• Black churches burning 
• Police shoot another innocent man
• Rape and violence up in civil warring South Sudan
• Swedish school sword rampage

Worked myself to the
bones this week.

So are these the headlines we write day in and day out?  

For most of us, no, we live a mundane life.

We work our 9 to 5's and go about our day in relative peace.

Except on the 405--there we question the doctrine of human dignity.

But how do we avoid becoming simultaneously the most connected and least connected generation of all time?

Am I just the voice of our mothers and fathers crying out, "do better than I did?"

Do we rise up to change our social and political structures?  Do we work the system?  Do we grow jaded, give up, and wait for the next generation to "fix things?"

For the uninformed, Pope Francis has declared an extraordinary Jubilee year of Mercy³.

Let's make mercy more than something we talk about.

It begins December 8th, 2015.

The Year of Mercy.

Can it change the world?

Yes.  Mercy can change the world.

Will it change the world?

That is a headline you must decide to write.

Though I will undoubtedly stumble, you can consider me all in.

NOTES

1. Janet Ewell advised our high school journalism crew, which I was a part of from 2003 to 2005.  We won best overall at the Los Angeles Times 5-county competition for high school 4 page spread.  She got LA Times Sports writer Bill Plaschke to come and mentor us.  Aside from journalism, she was always a great encouragement and advocate for me as a young man of faith.
2. Links to LA Times and Al Jazeera news sites provided for your curiousity!
3. A jubilee year has biblical roots and is essentially a special year for remission of sins.  They typically fall in 50 year intervals, but this one does not so it is "extraordinary."