I’m not about to say anything new. I don’t think there is anything new to say under the sun, really. Just new prisms through which to view the old. Sappho and Shakespeare and Hemingway tell the same stories. Life and love, with its heartache and joy. The stories are the same, across centuries, across oceans, because at the heart of it people are the same. We forget that, sometimes.
One of my favorite giving organizations is Heifer International. This is in part nostalgic. It was one of my grandmother’s favorite organizations. The premise is that Person A, through Heifer International, gifts Person B a gift of livestock, and when that livestock thrives, Person B gifts from their growing herd or flock to Person C, their neighbor. Through compassion and hard work, a struggling community can thrive. Quarterly or so, we get Heifer’s newsletter and this time I noticed the final page, which just said, Leave It Better Than You Found It.
Leave It Better Than You Found It is another one of those not-new ideas. The Girl Scouts drill this idea into their members from kindergarten up. When camping, when on trips, in our own communities, leave it better than you found it. This isn’t limited to recycling and planting trees, though let’s do both of those things. To leave the world better than we found it, we need to leave people better than we found them, as well. And this can take so little. How many times have you felt a slight uplift at the sight of someone else smiling, or a child laughing? Be the person smiling. Be the person laughing. Be the first person to pay it forward at the Starbucks drive-through. It’s so easy to do. And so easy not to. I used to carry a little bit of cash with me, and I had a rule with myself that if I was the first car at a stoplight with a panhandler, I was obligated by human connectivity to give to that person, whether it happened randomly three times in a day, or once in a week. When did I stop doing that? When did it become too much of a hassle to have cash on hand? Easier to avert my gaze and turn the radio up. I forgot the parable of the faithful servant. To whom much has been given, much will be required.
I asked my daughter what she thought would make the world a better place. She didn’t take more than three seconds to think about it. “Say nice words, and when people fall down, help them up.” She just turned eight. I think we’re born knowing more about human compassion and kindness than we can ever appreciate when we’re young. And somehow, as we grow older, we begin to lose this principled default view. We’ve been disappointed by life a little more. We’ve worked hard and had things fall apart. We’ve seen people who didn’t work hard be rewarded. Our compassion is tested by our own sense of fair play but also by our sense of self-preservation. When we were cavemen, stopping to help the clanmate with a broken leg meant being trampled by a Mammoth or picked off by a saber tooth tiger. Fair point. Here’s the best thing, though. We’re not cavemen any more. We don’t have to think solely with our fight or flight frontal lobe. We can retain our childhood compassion. We can say nice words and help people up.
This week saw two mass shootings and multiple police officers shot in the line of duty. The first mass shooting, in Wichita, killed 4 and wounded 20. The second was in Washington state, and I’m sad to report that I don’t know anything about it except the headline. I was going to read an article about the Wichita victims, saw the Washington headline, and read neither. I wonder what Cate Blanchet will wear to the Oscars this year? I heard the weather’s supposed to be nice. Oh, and look, Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck came together to celebrate their son’s birthday. Good for them.
Speaking for myself, I become desensitized to the news because it would hurt too much to be too sympathetic. If I thought of each of the victims of the week’s publicized shootings, if I thought of their families, if I thought about the starving children of Syria, and the people horrifically executed by IS by being strapped to chairs and pushed off roofs, just because of their genetics… If I internalized these things and was truly compassionate about them, I’d never get out of bed. So instead, I choose the easier path. I become a disconnected bystander. A passerby, hurrying home to dinner, surfing past the nightly news. Assad’s regime is holding civilians under siege as people, children, die of starvation and desperate parents are killed by sniper fire as they try to find any last vegetation to feed to their children. How awful. Is The Voice on? Please pass the salt.
I don’t think this makes me a horrible person. Of course, I have some bias in saying that. I think that people generally want to help each other out. I want to. People want to say nice words and help people up when they fall down. They want to leave people, the world, better than they found it. But it’s a heavy burden to take on, to truly open our eyes to all the places, all the people who need our help. I’m just one person. How much can I do? Is it worth it to wake up every day with my heart broken?
I think this is part of the reason that the presidential election primaries have come to the place that they have. We’ve detached ourselves from the process. It takes a hell of a lot to get our attention. We skim the headlines, but we remain a disconnected bystander. Just like I see the hopelessness in Syria and think, “That’s awful, but it could never happen here,” I look at a presidential candidate advocating killing Muslims with bullets dipped in pig’s blood, and I think, “That’s awful. But in the end, that won’t happen here. In the end, the United States would never elect someone so hateful and divisive.” Sure the first images of each scenario are shocking and distressing, but frankly you get used to both headlines, and as long as I don’t think about it too much, and can assure myself that it can never happen here, I can keep myself detached.
Well, shame on me. My husband says that most of the time, I am so careful to be politically and socially sensitive, not to rock the boat, that I stay universally likeable, that anyone outside of my inner circle has no idea what I am thinking. One of my good friends recently told me, shocked me by telling me, that she often has no idea when I’m happy or angry because I’m generally so even-keeled. And there’s a place for that. No one needs to know what everyone is actually thinking at every moment of the day. We’d all be friendless and alone. But Coco Chanel said, “The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.”
On this eve of Super Tuesday, I ask everyone to think for themselves. How are we doing at the parable of the faithful servant? How are we doing living up to our own standards? If our actions today, or our inactions, are the blueprint for social conscience for our children, for our grandchildren, are we satisfied with that? Are the consequences of our choices today something we’re prepared to see through? Have we thought about the consequences? When children of a different religion die before they have a chance to live just because they were born somewhere without a proud blue passport, are we satisfied telling our children that it’s okay? That in any event, we wouldn’t want them to be here, that we’d brand their identification with a stamp of their “otherness” and mock their religion and their god? Is that what we’ve become? Can we look at ourselves and say truthfully, “We said nice words, and we helped people up when they fell down?” Can we hold ourselves to the standards of our 8-year-olds?
If at the end of the day we do even one thing with compassion, I think we can begin to face the world as it really is, and that compassion saves us from waking up with our hearts quite so torn. From being so detached. Because helping other people heal begins to heal the brokenness in us, and let’s face it, we’re all pretty broken. Or at least I am. I’m hopeful and hypocritical and angry; I’m both brokenhearted and indifferent, depending on how work went, how my children behave, what time I can finally walk through my front door.
Aloud, I’m going to say that for my household, for my children, I want them to know by my actions that when you have more than you need — not more than you want, but more than you need — you build a longer table, not a higher fence and not a wall along our southern border. That we can disagree without calling names, that we should be brokenhearted about homeless veterans, and Ebola orphans and the families who have lost loved ones in senseless shootings. We should read their names and we should speak up for what we believe in, for what breaks our hearts, and we should do so compassionately, eloquently and most importantly, thoughtfully. And aloud.
Who are we as a nation? Who are we as a community? We have a chance to advocate for our idealistic 8-year-olds with our vote. Let’s not waste it.