Seneca Lake, and something you can do

If you find this interesting, please donate to my charity at GoFundMe!

I rode 79 miles around Seneca Lake on Saturday, by myself. It's the only one of my 10 rides I expect to do alone - but, like most everyone else in our country, I had a lot to think about anyway.

Don't worry, I'll be brief.

How can we hold in mind at the same time both the ongoing, centuries-old tragedy of the treatment of black people in America and also the need to support, not demonize, the people whose job it is to uphold our laws? Can we find a way to talk about the bias each of us carries around every day without devolving to hypocrisy and shaming?

I find this sort of rhetorical exercise tiresome. Even writing those two sentences was tiresome.

Here's what I think. It has always been a feature of humanity on Earth that there are opportunities to help people. I'm inclined to believe that feature was created on purpose, but that's another point.

Those opportunities (that is, instances of human suffering) exist in an abundance and variety we can scarcely conceive of. You could never get to the end of them if you dedicated 10 lifetimes to it.

The trick, though, is that you have to actually act on them. And that's where everyone gets stuck. How many Facebook posts or news stories have you seen in the last two weeks that finish in some hopeless rhetorical question? What can I do? When will things change? What's the matter with everyone?

Look: there are literally thousands of people in Rochester, or wherever you are living, who will give you something to do that will lead to a demonstrable improvement in the state of the world.

If you go to a food cupboard, they'll say: put these potatoes in this box. If you go to a hospice, they'll say: take these sheets and go change that bed. If you go to a school, they'll say: take this book and read it to that kid.

Those are things that make things better, and you can pick any one you like. That's a blessing!

The subtext here is that I want you to donate money to the charity I'm riding around all these lakes for. Nurse-Family Partnership is good at that simple declarative sentence kind of help: they pay nurses to spend a lot of time with poor pregnant teenagers so their babies have half a shot at a healthy, successful, fulfilling life. That's not a hashtag; that's actually changing the world.

I guess I wasn't terribly brief after all.

About Seneca Lake: that was the longest I've ever ridden my bike in one shot, and I was feeling it by the end. The last 15 miles or so were very challenging. It was a great sense of accomplishment, though, to look back across the lake to where I had been riding six hours earlier and know I'd gone that far on my own locomotion.

Better yet, while I was doing it, four people donated a combined $95, bringing my total above $1,300. Thanks to Christine, Bill, Dave and Brian. We're accomplishing something.