‍The Odyssey is an epic film.  It recounts Homer’s 500 page poem that was written more than 2,700 years ago about events that occurred nearly a thousand years before that - at the end of the Bronze Age. A recurrent theme in both the poem and the film is the Law of Zeus, or xenia, which required hosts to welcome strangers into their homes and guests to respect the host’s home and property. Violating the law meant facing the direct wrath of Zeus.

My son Ted always comes home for his birthday…he’s here this week. And we have been taking walks in the cool June evenings. Every few months, he eagerly leaves LA to return to Kansas—he misses the comparative quiet, clean and order of things here. As we walked the other night, fireflies twinkled in the yards. Kids rode their bikes down tree lined streets, couples strolled with well-behaved dogs, and our fellow walkers greeted us with “hello” or a friendly wave. In my 1960s neighborhood, with the fireflies blinking, I remembered my childhood when we would catch them in jars and set them by our bedsides…my parents sneaking in to release them from captivity after we fell asleep.

This has been an unsettling year, to say the least.  Increasingly, we hear our leaders piously quoting the Bible (accurately or not) and calling for an expanded role for I.C.E., an agency whose surveillance has gone beyond foreign nationals to include U.S. citizens who oppose the administration.  Meanwhile, our government denounces the theocratic rulers of Iran and the Revolutionary Guard—the mission of which is to preserve and enforce the ideology of the regime.  The juxtaposition is difficult to ignore: we increasingly appear to mirror the very traits we condemn the loudest.