All Shit and No Ponies: The Test of Real Magic
February 28, 2020

     Let me be clear: there is no "bright side" to the Holocaust.  There is no "upside" to rape.  There is no "silver lining" to child sex trafficking, the Soviet Gulags, or the mass murders of children at Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.  If you have two children, and one of them was killed in the 1963 bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, your glass is not "half full." 

     You might be able to rescue something from these atrocities, and others like them.  You might, somehow, by grace or by luck, manage to come away with your life and some dim glimmer of hope or some tiny spark of moral courage with which to rebuild your life, with which to receive again the good that life can offer.  You might be able to take your experience of evil and transform it into a force for good, into a force for hope, into a force for combating the very evil you have lived through, and others like it.  You might, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, write The Gulag Archipelago, to give the world a true account of the evil you have been subjected to, and perhaps, thereby, give it a few resources with which to fight such evil in the future.  You might, like Dudley Randall, forever memorialize, in a poem, a mother's grief at the loss of her young child in that 1963 bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, and perhaps, thereby, lay bare the sins of Jim Crow before the conscience of a nation, in the hope of redeeming that nation from its long history of sins.

     You might.

     But let me be clear: if you do this, if you somehow manage, by grace or by luck, to wrestle some good back out of the jaws of evil, or if you preserve one child's sense of wonder at life, and his basic sense of trust, in the midst of utter depravity and hatred, you are not making lemonade out of lemons.  There is no pony in that shit.  You are making something good in spite of evil, not because of it.

     You are doing something far more noble and far more necessary than seeing the bright side of a situation.  You are practicing the real magic, the magic borne of the truth – the kind of truth that sets you and others free for this purpose:  to fight the very real evil that is afoot in the world.

      Don't get me wrong.  As I said, I love me some lemonade.  And I love me some ponies, both real and metaphorical.  And when that hurricane or that flood rolls in and rolls back out, you can bet I'm gonna call up the damned cavalry, load them ponies down with sugar or honey, and set up an army of lemonade stands in the wake of disaster.  I can make lemonade outta that shit with the best of 'em.  And you can too.

     And we should.  We should practice alleviation of suffering wherever we find it, whatever its source.  We should practice bringing people together, and we should celebrate our fundamental interdependence on one another – an interdependence that we so easily forget until a natural disaster rolls in and rolls back out.  And we have that hurricane or that flood to thank for reminding us of this truth about ourselves.
     
     But this is not the real magic.  It is magical, no doubt.  It partakes of magic.  But the test of real magic is not whether we can withstand the tempests that nature, entropy, and chance throw at us.  No.  The test of real magic is whether we can speak and follow and fight for the truth when the forces of evil within and around us array themselves against the truth.

     Roberto Benigni understood this.  So he told us a true story – a story that revealed truth – about a father who saves his son's life by empowering him with a magical story.  That's the real magic.  Abracadabra!