I often watched Mr. Rogers with my daughter Emma, and I notice a lot of people are missing Fred Rogers in this cruel and divided time.

We don’t seem to love or know or get along with our neighbors these days, especially if they disagree with us. I wonder, like everyone else, if Mr. Rogers would be heartbroken watching our news in 2019.

I don’t think he would have given up on us, Mr. Rogers was a Presbyterian minister who died in 2003  and a man of great hope. Clearly, his spirit lives, he did good every day.

A movie about him starring Tom  Hanks is coming out next month. Millions of people want him back in any available form or medium.

It sometimes seems that everything this quiet and faithful man stood for has been discarded. I know that isn’t really true, but it’s hard to see the good that people do sometimes.

That’s why I love the Army Of Good. They do good every day, and help me to do good every day. That’s why I am loving my life. I get to do good every day and am committed to that.

It’s the best job I ever had.

A writer told a story shortly before Mr. Rogers died about five people helping a turtle cross the road in Georgia. Mr. Rogers said that would make a good story. The reporter asked him why.

Fred Rogers responded this way:

“Because whenever people come together to help either another person or another creature, something has happened, and everyone wants to know about it – because we all want to know that there’s a graciousness at the heart of creation.”

I loved that phrase – graciousness at the heart of creation, I know what he means, I think he is referring to the beauty of humanity, of doing good when we can, of loving our neighbors, of treating one another with dignity and respect.

As Rogers so frequently pointed out, everybody was a child once.

Rogers defined my new job and my real job when he said once that the real work we have as human beings was “to make goodness attractive in the so-called next millennium.”

The first thing I think of when I wake up is what good I’m going to do that day: getting someone a sweater or blanket who is cold, bringing cookies or muffins to the Mansion aides,  getting shoes for a refugee child wearing flip-flops in the winter, working on the new Mansion Staff Breakroom, getting an embattled and overwhelmed teacher some books, getting a sweater for a 78-year-old woman living in assisted care and shivering sometimes in the cold when she takes a walk.

One columnist wrote that if you watch the news, you will see that we have failed the challenge and spirit of Mr. Rogers, but my life and work tell me otherwise.

Today, a woman in Colorado sent me two $10 bills with the instruction “good some good with it.”

I did, and right away. Fred Rogers was a radical, a prophet, a warrior for good. He would love to see the mail I get in my post office box.

Earlier in the week, a weaver in Southern California send me a beautiful shawl she had made just for Sylvia, she knows she sits often by the window writing her letters.

“I like to think of her writing with a warm shawl draped over her shoulders,” she wrote. Graciousness, pure and simple.

The critics say that Fred Rogers has no successors, but my Post Office Box says otherwise.  We are  not all politicians fighting in Washington and on cable news and Twitter.

It is natural to do good. It is righteous to do good.

There is graciousness at the heart of creation. I see it every day and believe in it more strongly than ever. It is the most powerful force on earth.

The Fred Rogers I watched every weekday morning with my daughter would be making goodness attractive, now and forever.

I saw Parasite this evening a new movie by the wonderful director John-ho Bong. I don’t have time tonight to write a full review of it, but I do want to say it is a wonderfully gripping, timely and provocative movie. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Easily one of the best movies I have seen in many years.)