My favorite weekly news magazine is the Christian Science Monitor, thanks to its remarkably unbiased and intelligent international reporting and its devoted leaning toward highlighting individuals and groups in various highly challenging, often devastating, situations who work and strive and aid themselves and others with deep integrity and decency. Folks of all “political” persuasions.

This past week’s cover article (Back To School — in a phone free classroom?) included an interview with a woman in Utah, Corinne Johnson (a senior policy advisor for a Salt Lake City council member, and a mom),who created Utah Parents United — a conservative advocacy group for parental rights that has struggled to hold accountable the “Big Tech and billion dollar companies who view our children as products,” and who are fighting tooth and nail against anyone having the ability to restrict full access to social media to kids and teens.

As someone against government being involved in this and many other endeavors, believing that all parents and parents alone should determine what is and isn’t healthy for their kids, Mrs. Johnson discovered that she needed to involve government in this particular heroic battle because of the amount of sheer power and pennies wielded by those same tech companies (whose higher ups — it’s been documented — apparently frequently go out of their way to protect their own children from the ravages of social media addiction!).

I’m aware that many folks organizing for “parental rights” also want to limit access to certain books, certain kinds of medical information and care as well — not something I myself agree with. Nor am I averse to government being involved in struggles against big tech on behalf of children. But neither can I imagine that there aren’t millions upon millions upon millions of caring parents and teachers and grandparents in this country, no matter their political persuasion, who aren’t pretty desperate by now to minimize kids’ addiction to social media.

Seems like something an enormous amount of us can agree on enthusiastically. And work together on — in many different ways.

As we all know, “crossing the aisle” used to be something Democrats and Republicans and Independents used to do, not infrequently, thinking and fighting together on issues that concerned them both.

Surely there are many such issues that decent adult human beings can come together on — nationally and locally.

There’s a now fairly elderly British film called “Pride,” which is the fictionalized very true story (yes, you can check this out on the internet) of a small group of gay young people in the early eighties in London who actually banded together to start raising money to support the striking Welsh miners, who were at that point being almost literally starved into submission by Margaret Thatcher. Those young people did this because they realized that the miners were being treated as shamefully and as cruelly by people in power and on the street as they themselves were being treated at that time.

Surely you can imagine that the small, conservative, traditionalist Welsh mining town they chose to raise funds for and help in any way they could was not thrilled about meeting those young people, or even being helped by them. At first.

The film is not only heartening and true, it’s funny. Decency. Kindness. Hope. Listening to one another’s stories. Humor. What a combo!

Marianne Lust

Lincoln