As the pandemic continued, the government instituted a winter lockdown that was the most stringent yet, banning youth under 14 from meeting with more than one person outside the family previous lockdowns had exempted them. German politicians during the pandemic have been concerned mostly with the health of older and vulnerable adults, say child advocates, while downplaying the social and emotional needs of children. “Once children have learned and mastered this superpower, they can solve any difficult situation they are put in.” Frim, who lives in the central German town of Lollar. “In a situation like corona, you must have resilience – the ability to deal with change,” says Ms. But seeing gaps in support, citizens have stepped up in new ways during the pandemic to look out for children’s emotional needs. Germans expected the government to watch out for their kids. 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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