we just saw the mister rogers movie and i feel desolate. the saddest thing was seeing the hateful people across the street at his funeral. and then the people who said he destroyed a generation of kids by saying they are inherently special, inside, without doing anything sensational, just for who they are. they blamed him for the way the world is. so insane. afterwards i feel so sad that he's gone and we need the kind of love and care he gave and that it is just absent. 
but i know it's there, it's just locked inside. like people afraid to leave the house. the goodness locked inside, fearing evil. he thought that he could make a neighborhood, with tv, that would help people, bring out the best in them and create connections and cooperation. and i look at what is happening outside, here, and everywhere, development for money, not for neighborhood, development that displaces and divides, the haves taking over neighborhoods, destroying community, and using money to conquer and occupy the neighborhood, and country after country, towards world domination by a small minority of evil humans.
i didn't get a message of hope, and it seemed fred rogers himself despaired of what the world is now.
i watched him growing up and i felt that love and yet i grew cynical in the cynicism outside. i saw how he was ridiculed and i thought, how does that love and care translate into a habitable world. the reality outside of his neighborhood was brutal, and it grows more brutal still. 
i recommend the movie. it touches the place that seems bereft and vulnerable, like childhood, outside in the manufactured violence and destruction of the neighborhood. we should see mister rogers' neighborhood, see neighborhood everywhere, how it could be, and how, desperately, it is.
when i see something like yesterday when 14 city employees come to watch a man's belongings be wrested from his arms and crushed in a giant trash compactor i think, what would mister rogers do? the last time he sat at his piano in the tv neighborhood he was so weary. it was just after 911. he saw what was coming in the world neighborhood, and he was grief stricken and exhausted. i don't think he could bear what we've become today.