Most of us find the news of the day to be challenging, infuriating and stultifying. Sometimes frozen in place, we may wonder if there is any reason to keep trying to repair the world. Let us remember that terrific modern parable about the starfish.

A child comes along and sees a beachhead filled as far as the eye can see with washed up and vulnerable starfish. And there, at the shoreline stands a woman engaging in what appears to be an impossible task - returning the starfish to the sea. The child walks up and asks why she is doing this. He declares, "I mean, you could spend the whole day here and hardly make a dent. There must be hundreds of thousands." The woman looks at the child as she has just returned one more starfish to the water and says, "Well it sure made a difference to that one."