As elected officials in Washington set aside their own pride and gluttony and worked together to meet the needs of all the people in our great country, our not, I spent the day going from one event to another seeing the power of community coming together.

My Thursday morning started with a visit to a small neighborhood school in New Britain. They were starting a new program, a "Walking School Bus". Parents would walk their kids to school, along a predetermined route. Along the way, other kids would come out and join the group. They would all get exercise as they headed off to school. Parents would talk, and get some exercise themselves. The community would be strengthened and absenteeism would be decreased.

People from various community organizations showed up to join the celebration, encourage the families and look for ways to spread the program.

From their, I went to a meeting of the Connecticut Multicultural Health Partnership. We were discussing the National Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services (CLAS) Standards in Health and Health Care.

A friend, who does trainings on this for the Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, spoke about the importance of challenging your own thinking. I've been thinking about this a bit in writing. Next month is National Novel Writing Month. I wrote a novel one year, and tried a few other years, but just couldn't make enough time. I need to work much more on my writing; plot development, setting, and especially my characters. Other friends of mine in health care write novels, and it struck me that culturally and linguistically appropriate character development training would be great for novelists.

As an aside, Friday, I met with an HIV outreach worker and a couple college kids to talk about a social media and beyond project addressing stigmas in health care. The HIV outreach worker is HIV Positive. He talks a lot about being 'positive' and at one point we got into a discussion about how people with health stigmas, like being HIV positive is rarely portrayed in popular culture, let alone portrayed in a way that reduces stigma.

I ended Thursday off with a visit to a Fall Food Fair for Diabetes Awareness, yet another chance for people to help one another in culturally appropriate ways to live healthier.

Today, I head off to help people get health insurance, then to document people from work rebuilding a house for Habitat for Humanity.

All of this, I set against what is going on in social media. The noise about disfunction in the GOP controlled House of Representatives in Washington dominates my feed, interrupted by people talking about their struggles. One person grieves the death of her son to pediatric cancer as an important Muslim holiday approaches. Two others have posted about friends of theirs who have recently taken their lives. One wrote a great status update. I shared it with my own status update following the same vein.

I hate those: "If you're a real friend you'll post one word as a comment about how we met, copy and paste my status verbatim, send me $100 and annoy the hell out of all your friends at the same time" sort of status updates. They aren't real.

They are as bad as the "Facebook is taking selfie pictures of me in the shower and sending them to perverts in Croatia. Please change some unrelated privacy setting so hackers in Moscow can't come through your friend feed to get to those selfies" posts.

So, I was struck by John's post today. It's real, folks. It is about connecting the way we are supposed to connect, with compassion and empathy. Yesterday, another friend posted about someone they were close to who took their life.

Please, read this, read John's status update. Stop and think about the people behind the other status updates you read today. Try to find some way to help others around you.

Thank you John for starting this discussion. Let's hope it spreads.