Such callbacks aren’t just therapeutic – they’re marketable. Blockbuster, of course, is a thing of the past, but the childlike desires of kids at heart remain. I was close to my son’s age when I begged my parents to rent video games every weekend. I often chuckle when people suggest that a Blockbuster card is a form of ID for millennials. I celebrated the occasion at my local Gamestop, which allowed gamers and enthusiasts to win prizes, pick up the game, and quite frankly, be kids again. One of Nintendo’s staple franchises, The Legend of Zelda, enjoyed its first release in six years: Tears of the Kingdom. Then, I picked up a sword in search of adventure. Last Thursday, a few hours before midnight, I left my house in a folktale-like fashion.Īs the moonlight draped the bedroom, I tucked my oldest boy under the covers for the evening. Over the summer we’ll consider other reparations issues and locales.Building community is hard work, but it might be the fulcrum that lets us balance looking back and moving forward. Treating people well comes with thinking of them that way.Having achieved this, the entire community experiences abundance, “like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.” It earns the name “repairer of the breach” and can “build the old waste places.”If today’s debate over reparations builds community, that sounds like progress to me, whatever decision is reached.Today’s issue, dedicated to reparations, looks at slavery, forced assimilation, and territorial dispossession – in the United States, Barbados, and Canada. And behind those good actions, Isaiah indicates, are good attitudes – compassion and humility. People feed the hungry, free the oppressed, undo heavy burdens. We have to move forward, somehow. To try to understand what might promote that, I turned to the world’s most-read book, the Bible. This phrase in Isaiah 58 piqued my interest: “repairer of the breach.”Here, the repairer isn’t a carpenter or mason but a caring community. That’s what researchers working with Saint Louis University are doing to learn about those enslaved by Jesuits at the school.Yet no amount of looking back can recompense historical harms. We can’t go back and undo the horrors of the middle passage or the sundering of families at slave auctions.What restoration is possible centuries later?A first step can be looking back and taking an honest accounting of the past. That’s where the hard work happens to restore, renew, make whole. But the shorter word it comes from – repair – strikes me as even bigger.As a noun, reparations suggests that a decision has been reached about concrete actions to redress past wrongs. As a verb, repair is a process.
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