"Mister
Rogers gave comfort. He didn’t sell it. He didn’t knock us over the
head with it. It wasn’t cool or sexy or easy. He considered the space
between the television set and the viewer to be “sacred,” something millions of children understood — and that their parents forgot.
That’s
a shame, because we were the ones who needed Mister Rogers’s wisdom
most of all. The big words, long explanations and instructions about how
to be and what to do that we favored often gave us little solace.
Instead, we needed an honest voice who considered the darkness and met
it with hope, who recognized self-hatred and met it with compassion.
As
a child, Mister Rogers became extremely frightened by something on the
news and wondered how he would ever be safe. His mother gave him simple
but profound advice. “Always look for the helpers,”
she told him, with the quiet certainty that they could always be found.
Who are the helpers right here, right now, in our troubled lives?"
