We Do the Best We Can

In the musical, Candide, lyrics to "Make Our Garden Grow" have always touched my profoundly. 

"We're neither pure, nor wise, nor good.

We'll do the best we know."

I have been angry over the years at real or perceived wrongs done to me and those I love.  When my favorite babysitter died and somehow my parents forgot to tell me, I was outraged. When my father went bonkers about obvious hygiene rules when a pink razor was left on the kitchen sink, I was embarrassed and freaked out. When I first learned about my sister's deadly illness when she was fourteen-- even though my parents had known since she was three and hadn't expected her to live past five-- I felt left out of the loop and distrusted. I am a passionate human and have shed tears over these moments, and more.

But then, Bernstein's lyrics based off of Voltaire pull me back together. We do the best we know. 

My parents are amazing human beings. I marvel at what they did to support education in my hometown and to promote the arts. Their advocacy for special education, gifted education, music education, and above all good teaching went above and beyond anything I can imagine. They raised four very different daughters and managed to take us to 48 states and many countries, always researching sites for children first. We always had books and lessons and laughter. They took time for birdfeeders and gardens and stopping along the roadside to feed a horse or watch suckling pigs. 

I can't imagine what it would really be like to raise one child, let alone four. I can't imagine what it would be like to raise four children, let alone four highly spirited ones like Liz, Jess, Melinda and me. Above all, I can't imagine raising a chronically ill child with the constant risks my family faced.

Melinda was born in 1983, born to a heroin addict. She came to my family in 1984. I wrote about the day we found out she was sick in a previous post.  Later, I knew she was ill, and I knew we needed to use universal precautions, but I did not know the name of her sickness or that it usually came with a death sentence. 

My parents did the best they knew. They wanted her to live as normal a life as was humanly possible. They didn't want any stigma to hurt my sister or our family. So they didn't tell her the name of her sickness until she was old enough that it was necessary. They never told their parents, either. They lived alone with the worry and left the hope for the rest of us.

So, maybe my mom's brain was a little cluttered with the four of us and our academic, social, emotional and medical names; can I really fault her for first telling me about Mrs. Habacker's death when a letter was returned?  Maybe my father  didn't know that girls think it is gross to share one another's razors and didn't want to risk a little sister inadvertently infecting her big sisters. And maybe the hope and expectation that Melinda would outlive her sickness was part of the charm (along with amazing medicine and doctors) that let her live longer than anyone born with her illness in 1983.  We do the best we know.

So now, as I am researching the Holocaust, I am hit with this sudden crisis of innocence. How can I believe "We do the best we know" when faced with the violent cruelty of World War Two (and any other war or genocide for that matter)?   It would be a cop out to say that the shooting, the gas chambers, the torture was the best that anyone could know, and that a society could condone (and create) it.

I was moved to write this post after watching a documentary called "Hitler's Children" in which the grandchildren and/or other close relatives of Nazi leaders were interviewed years after the war.   How can I fit my innocent view into this graphic knowledge?  

Yes, I can say my family is special. I know that. We are special in our imperfections as well as in the metaphoric garden that we make grow each day. 

I don't have the answers. But I think some of it has to do with the Systems we are in.  My childhood was not wanting for food, love or sunshine. The places and situations  where I felt hurt or wronged were parts of systems gone wrong.  I was bullied in school-- this was the 1980s when districts still had a coddle-the-bully and tell the victim not to cry mentality. Something was wrong with that system. My sister's health situation and my own delay in getting help for depression were linked to systemic problems: stigmatized illnesses in a society too scared to say we don't yet know how to solve all physical and emotional illnesses. Something was wrong with the system. And yes-- antisemitism and other prejudices still exist in our world systems too, and I have been hurt by that and by watching my multicultural friends get hurt by it too. 

We do the best we know--- but we live in systems that sometimes prevent us from knowing, or at least which prevent us from thinking that there might be another way.  Individual fear is one thing, but societal fear is a system that is so powerful and dangerous that it has created crusades and death camps. 

I don't have the answers but I have to start honking about how we can change the systems that allow for hurt and replace them with systems that lead to healing.