“In seeking wisdom, the first stage is silence, the second listening, the third remembrance, the fourth practicing, the fifth teaching.’ – the Kabbalah.

While the people who claim to lead us look frantically for someone to blame, I have a better idea. Here’s how to help the suffering and struggling people of Texas get through their power and water crisis.

You can also search for ways here.

If you do, you will feel good about yourself and our country. This is what it means to be human.

The politics of grievance have the country in as bad a grip as the winter. We are quick to blame, slower to help. And whether we help or blame determines our soul’s nature, individually and nationally.

The first thing that always strikes me about extremists on the left or the right is how miserable and unpleasant they are.

If I were President, God Help All Of Us, I would propose a 30-day moratorium on blaming any government official or institution (except Ted Cruz maybe)  for any emergency or catastrophe. There is always time to find blame; there isn’t always time to help people in grave need.

The only political response permitted would be helping the needy and the vulnerable; there is no shortage of them ever.

Blame was flying all over the place. Help was slower to come.

No wonder we are becoming a nation of whiners and the aggrieved. I can’t keep track of all the power failure suspects, and I don’t really even care, not now.

In recent years, I’ve learned that spiritual transformation does not mean seeking refuge from the problems of life by burning incense or meditation or chanting or blaming others for our pain and troubles.

The Kabbalah teaches us to confront our chaos and our reactions to it.

“The more banners there are, the more chances we have to plug in the Light. The more obstacles, the greater the number of triggers to ignite our reactions, so that we can resist and transform them.”

It’s one of the great ironies of life; trouble often gives us the chance to be wiser and better.

Texas is another obstacle of opportunity that we blew. If you want to know how to come together as people, try helping other people in crisis.

I remember when my car slid down that hill and into a ditch two weeks ago, and I was trapped inside as it rolled over.

All kinds of people in my town – blue and red, young and old,  liberal and conservative, came rushing over to pull me out of the car and offer to help.

Nobody asked me who I voted for. Every one of them asked me how they could help.

Compassion and empathy are transformative. In one sense, transformation is the purpose of our lives.

How else can we learn? How can we grow? Every time trouble finds me; I grow in some way. I learn in some way. I change in some way.

For me, that is what spiritual transformation means. Most people do their best. I’m sure nobody in Texas wanted anybody to die or freeze to death. That kind of suffering is for the community, not politicians, to share.

Only obstacles can offer us that opportunity. Texas was and is a profound opportunity.

A friend called me yesterday to rant and rage about the media. He is wealthy, successful, happily married, with four beautiful children.

He was so unhappy because he read something in a magazine about racism that upset him. He spent an afternoon on the phone seeking to cancel his subscription and yell at the person on the other end of the phone. Then he wanted to yell at me.

People are dying in Texas, I said; I don’t want to hear it. I may have lost a friend. I hope so.

I wondered why it is that he spent so much time in a grievance when he had so many reasons for joy? Is a magazine article so important?

The more I think about it, the more I come back again and again to grievance when I try to understand why our country is so sick and joyless.

I woke up this morning and prayed for the millions of people in the South suffering from extreme cold, the loss of electricity the fouling of their water.

Then I had a better idea.

Praying is fine, but it won’t give people freshwater. How about helping them?

I turned to an online news site to understand what was happening. I was hit in the face, and perhaps the soul, by the wave of grievance, blame, and accusations that dominated the news. .

Politics, of course, had once again come before humanity.

There was mercy and help and concern as well, but the big stories were all about blame and resentment, the true pandemic of our national soul. Helping was a sidebar, never the big story.

Some people blamed solar wind turbines, others blamed Texas independence,  Democrats blamed Republicans, and Republicans blamed Democrats, and the Governor blamed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the environmentalists attacked the governor.

While people burned their furniture to stay warm and had no way to boil their tainted water or be warm in sub-zero temperatures, we were a nation once again enmeshed in a grievance, finger-pointing, division and resentment.

Donald Trump was a symptom, not the cause.

We are stuck in outrage. Grievance improves nobody and changes nothing. It just makes real leadership nearly impossible.

In all honesty, I have to nod to our new President. He doesn’t do grievance.

There wasn’t much time for compassion or the uplift and joy from a community coming together to help people. To do that, I had to look far beyond the headlines.

We are losing sight of the warm and hopeful nature of life. We forget to listen and empathize. We teach hate to one another, not any love.

A friend I know well in the hospital; she broke a leg in a skiing accident. When I called to ask her how she was, she told me she had been fighting with the nurses for three days and thought they were the dumbest and least caring people she had ever met.

I’ve had a good deal of experience with nurses this year and I found them bright, compassionate, empathetic, and kind in just about every instance. I don’t know, I told my friend, you don’t become a nurse to hurt people.

They have the most difficult jobs. Hospitals are understaffed; nurses have little power; they struggle with red tape and power-hungry doctors and needy and hurting people.

You have to be tough with them, my friend insisted, you have to yell at them or nobody will come to help you. If you don’t shout, nobody comes.  I wished her well and got off the phone. I couldn’t do it. There goes another friend.

Another opportunity with trouble: figure out who your friends really are.

I listened to my friend in the hospital. It took them too long to come, she complained, the food is awful,  they had to talk to doctors before they changed medications, they didn’t listen to her or care what she said or was feeling.

I’m sure she was suffering, but I found that she had no interest in listening to me, or caring about what I was feeling, and soon enough, I had no interest in telling her about my “obstacles.”

When I had a problem with nurses, I reminded myself how difficult their jobs were and made it a point to quietly and patiently talk to them.

They always tried to help me. Like me, they do the best they can, usually in the most difficult of circumstances.

I thought back on this difficult year and saw clearly how big a role grievance played in our national distrust.

Polarization is a fuzzy word to describe social movements on all sides peopled by people with chips on their shoulders, with hatred for this leader or that, for this media or that, for this policy or that.

What an opportunity Texas was for us to come together, to send money and help. It was so easy to come across the resentment and anger, it was so easy  and inexpensive to send water to people who desperately need it . Convoys of Hope sprung up all over the country; I found several online and on social media in seconds and sent two cases of water to Texas for a little more than 10 dollars.

You can try the American Fidelity Foundation, working to help Dallas’s people.

In the time it takes to complain about the left or the right, people can send a case of water to Texas, and it feels so much better than complaining and looking for people to blame.

One thing America knows how to do very well is send trucks of bottled water places; they do it hundreds of thousands of times a day.

No one in America needs to go without water.

Someone should be accountable for all this suffering and poor planning. Life happens, and it is not all preventable. Some of it is. I’m sure there are ways to do better.

April would be a good time to look for them.