To America's Leaders:

There's a scene from the movie "Moonstruck," where the female lead, has just slept with and fallen in love with her fiancé's brother. In her pain and anguish, she goes to confess to her priest. The priest wisely refrains from chastising her. All he says is, "Consider your life."

In this time where our country struggles with how to respond to attack, loss of life of loved ones, and trauma in the witnessing of these events, our best hope is to "Consider our lives." Terrible times call for our finest efforts, our best actions. It is our chance to act, for lack of a better word, maturely. Maturity requires one to dig deep, to evaluate who we are and what we want, to act not on first impulse, to think about the following questions, and others: Who are we as a country? Do our actions represent how we want to be remembered by the world, for posterity? What will our actions lead to, on the world stage, and in the eyes of eternity?

The most natural thing in the world is just to feel what we feel, and then to act the way we feel like acting. We feel anger, fear, sadness, hopelessness, wrenching, stressful. We act by blaming, giving up, trying harder; we wish to punish, to avenge, to retaliate, to lash out, to annihilate. Why "Consider our lives", why slow down at all when these feelings and desires are the most natural to have at a time like this?

Because our only hope in stopping the cycle of tragedy, violence, bloodshed and terror is to mature. To mature as a species. Maturity requires us to do the most difficult emotional act that a human being can do: to grieve. To grieve. Starting from the first moment of loss in this great tragedy, we must recognize our own reactions for what they really are: the grief of a nation. To be strong enough to bear this awful pain, to know we can bear it because when we admit the truth of how awful we feel, we know we can lean on each other in this time of need. And definitely not to rashly act, and call the rash action grief.

Think for a moment of all the tragedies in history that have been worsened in the name of grief. The hundred years wars, families set upon families, the unending feuds, the continual losses that historians can track to their beginnings, but that no one can really tell us why they continue. Tragedies that lengthened, compounded, extended ad infinitum because of forgetting to do the real turning inside, turning to each other to really understand what we are experiencing: grief. To mourn, to wail, to beat our breasts with the pain of it. To listen to one another, to understand, to sit across the table, all the world's tables. To know we can trust each other to speak our own truth, and to counsel each other against rash action. And, together, to heal.

You see, in grief there is healing. And the healed person, the healed nation, is the most whole person, the most whole nation. Without wholeness we are but fractions, poor imitations of our strongest selves. In grief there is peace, not to end up in futile passivity or in trying to forget, but the real peace of knowing one has done one's best, one has reached deeper, found one's best motives, one's highest calling.

You are our elected leaders. You knew when we sent you to serve that situations could arise where we would ask the most of you that anyone could ask, and this moment has arrived. I am asking you to grieve. I am asking you to reach inside and find your best self, to be that self for me, to represent me by showing that best self to the world in your decisions of how to act in the face of these recent and horrible acts.

So, yes, I am asking you to find peace. With me, with other leaders, with all in the world who are concerned with what has happened and will continue to happen. Reach inside, and grieve, and be at peace with us all.

Signed,

Dave Minden
4322 Upland Drive
Madison, Wisconsin 53705
(608)238-0693