In my favorite scene from one of my favorite movies, the 1982 film The Year of Living Dangerously, Billy Kwan (played by Linda Hunt, who won and Academy Award for the role)  pounds on the keys of his typewriter, asking the question,  “What then must we do?” 

This deeply disturbing question returned to me this week when a friend posted a Facebook comment on the arrest and death of Sandra Bland thereby eliciting a firestorm of comments that ultimately ended with the shrug of collective virtual shoulders and a nearly audible electronic sigh of, “well, there’s really nothing that can be done.”

This is then accompanied by the news this morning of a particularly disturbing trend in evictions in San Francisco, the murder charge against a university police officer (in the town where I was born) for shooting a man in the head over a missing front license plate. All before coffee, and my morning pause to feed Mimo the cat the little morsel of canned food that I just found out is fished in the seas of SE Asia by slaves who are chained, starved, beaten and killed in a nightmare scenario of maritime  kidnapping, extortion and piracy that rivals anything from the days of Captain Blood… All for profits to Nestle and a satisfied meow from Mimo the cat.

What then must we do?

And then… There’s this… 

What then must we do?

A dear friend of mine is fond of saying, “you can be the pebble in the pond,” and she is both good at being that herself and at doing a wonderful job of telling the stories of others who do it too.

My daughter is amazing at caring and doing for people within her “circle of influence” as well as advocating for those outside that circle.

My friend Erica does this.

What about you? What then must you do?