A SNOW JOB

"Snow Storm Study", oil, by Jason Tako

We haven’t had much snow this season, but I realized this morning, again, that I have been the victim of a serious “snow job” for years and years. A snow job might be described as a deceptive story that tries to hide the truth, which is the kind of fantasy story I’ve been hearing all my life regarding the supremacy of evil and the relative fragility of good. In countless ways, the world has worked hard to make evil seem like the leader and good like a pale follower, a fragile onlooker that lingers in the background, breaking through with its little light now and then, but only when evil allows it. Life, this story says, is an endless struggle between evil and good, and the conquest always, in the end, goes to evil. It’s refreshing, this morning, to remember that this story is as fantastical and false as the story of the tooth fairy. This world I’m lucky to be living in is loaded with good like sunlight is loaded with warmth. The good I feel and see and hear each day doesn’t bow for a minute to the make-believe power of evil. There’s more force in a smile of friendship than there is in the scariest disease, and these smiles are spread across the earth at all times, and they live on long after a disease has has shouted its hair-raising words and disappeared.  I’ve seen good that grows ever stronger in the presence of evil – good that says evil can have its charades and pretenses and shams, but that good will get all the trophies in the end. Just on this small street I live on there is good that’s greater and stronger than sunshine or snowstorms. It tells the true story of this life we’re all lucky to be living.