One of my great loves is the theatre, so when Ed and I visit London, I spend an entire weekend several months before, sifting through the city’s 241 theatres for “what’s on”: dramas, comedies, musicals and, always, “The Bard”—my beloved Shakespeare. Generally, this means a trip to the Globe Theatre (to which I donated £5 toward its reconstruction nearly fifty years ago when I was a poor student and £5 was a lot). This May, however, I was delighted to find not one but two of Will’s works on stage: Romeo & Juliet at the Globe and Richard II at the Bridge Theatre.

What’s All the Excitement About?

The Bridge Theatre always puts on great shows, but this production was on my absolutely-not-to-be-missed list for two reasons: 1) it was the only Shakespeare play I had never seen and 2) it had achieved a kind of notoriety in its day among Queen Elizabeth and her court for the scene where Henry Bolingbroke deposes King Richard II and has him imprisoned for life after Richard does a lot of bad stuff, including stealing Bolingbroke’s inheritance and banishing him from England. Bolingbroke then seizes the throne as King Henry IV.

The political intrigues and issues of the day are too numerous to go into here. Suffice it to say that there were many who would have been happy to see Elizabeth deposed, or worse. The queen, herself, was recorded as saying, “I am Richard II, know ye not that?” The scene containing Richard II’s forced abdication was banned by the Master of the Revels—a royal official who acted as a censor in Elizabeth’s reign—and stricken from all printed copies.

If all this 16^th century intrigue seems like so much long-ago mumbo-jumbo, let me put it in contemporary terms: A movie written now that showed Elon Musk deposing Trump and seizing the Oval Office—how long do you think it would run? How many heads would roll?

I ordered the tix straight away.

The Clock Starts Ticking   

6:15 The Evening Begins in High Anticipation

I like to get to the theatre comfortably early, say 7:00 pm for a 7:30 curtain. Stroll up to the bar, order a drink, and relax in a setting often decorated with photos from past theatre “biggies”—Noel Coward, Terence Rattigan, Harold Pinter. I calculated it would take us about 35 minutes to get from our flat to the Bridge Theatre—a simple three stops away on the Tube (London’s subway) with one transfer—and added 10 minutes for good measure. A 6:15 departure for a 7:00 arrival. No sweat. I could practically taste my gin-and-tonic!

What I hadn’t figured into the mix was the chaos we encountered at the Holborn tube station. A platform jam-packed with hundreds of people. Not just 100 or 200 people but more like 500 to 600. The entire Central line was in an uproar, running only a fraction of the usual trains. And the station was reporting major delays everywhere.

Okay, I know the London tube map pretty much like the back of my hand. Plan change: We would take the station’s other line, the Piccadilly, down two stops to Leicester Square, then transfer to the Northern line from there down to Waterloo and walk the south bank of the Thames to the theatre on the far side of London Bridge. It looked very doable—if we hustled.

6:45 As The Crow Flies NOT!

Getting off at Waterloo station, my plan was to walk along the Thames to The Globe Theatre—an unmissable half-way mark—then continue along to the Bridge Theatre, also fronting on the river. Roughly, a tad more than a mile as the crow flies according to my London AtoZ map. Should take us about 20 minutes. Twenty-five max. A quickie pre-theatre quaff still seemed possible.

Only the crow didn’t fly, not straight anyway. Leaving Waterloo station, I was shocked at all the construction work we encountered and its attendant paraphernalia—bulldozers, cranes, stacks of materials and a host of temporary structures to shelter the smaller machinery and tools—which in turn, had given rise to half a dozen food stands to feed the glut of workers. All this stuff obscured our view, making it impossible to see a clear way to the riverbank. It’s not easy to lose something as large as the Thames River but it took more than a few minutes to get our orientation straight. Okay, forget the pre-theatre drink.

We started off, squeezing through gaps wherever possible to follow the Thames. After three or four detours, and now in the waning light, it was difficult to be certain just exactly where we were. I paused every hundred yards or so to look at the “You Are Here” maps displayed on lamp posts. No mention of the Bridge Theatre on any of them. My American cellphone was useless. It doesn’t have internet overseas unless I’m in a shop or café with wifi. But I’m an optimist. Surely the Bridge Theatre would show up after we passed the Globe.

7:00 Where Oh Where Has My Theatre Gone?

Okay, we got to the Globe after forging our way through the crush of Friday night revelers on the riverbank beneath the Millennium Bridge—constructed in 2000 to celebrate, you guessed it, the Millenium!—and continued on through several shopping arcades until I spotted another “You Are Here” poster. Miracle of miracles, it featured the Bridge Theatre! Now all I had to do was find Tooley Street where the London Bridge tube station stood—the station we would have gotten off at ages ago if the mess with the Central Line had never happened. But it did happen, so now we had to wend our way through the streets until we found Tooley.

But oh, what a wending way was there, to paraphrase (quite liberally) the Ghost of Hamlet’s father. Again, as the crow flies, it was less than half a mile. Again, the crow failed us. Created through the centuries—the first roads were actually laid down by the Romans almost 2,000 years ago—London streets have a tendency to twists and turns and whimsical name changes mid-road. After we returned to the States, I got the Google map directions for the jaunt from the Globe to the Bridge Theatre. They included eight left turns (one denoted as “sharp”), four right turns, and twelve street or place names with a lot of “continue onto” directives where a street bent or changed names. The last time we had gone to the Bridge Theatre was May 2022 to see Ralph Fiennes in “Straight Line Crazy.” I would have given anything for a straight line that evening, but alas…

7:15  Almost There But Not There        

As we drew closer to London Bridge, I continued checking my AtoZ in the near dark—where the hell was Tooley Street? After a few more twists and turns, we came to a wider road with shops and offices on both sides—a throughfare of sorts. I paused at every corner to check the buildings for the street name, something that is usually posted wherever two roads intersect. Five blocks along, I still had not encountered such a sign. During World War II, the Brits had removed the street-name signs in London to confuse the Germans should they invade—well, as a tactic, I can vouch for its success.

Ed, walking ten paces behind, informed me it was 7:20. Ten minutes to curtain.

At last, I saw a man dressed in some sort of city-employee type garb standing in a doorway. I asked him if this was Tooley Street. Yes, he said. We cranked up the pace. Several hundred yards on was the sign I’d been looking for—Potters Fields! A small side street, more like a walkway, Potters Fields led us through a large green space where we trailed several dozen people heading down to… the Bridge Theatre! O happy day! I hustled as I’ve seldom hustled—and I’m a fast walker under even the most relaxed circumstances. But, alas, we arrived—I kid you not—one minute after curtain, and so had to wait in a room adjacent to the auditorium, where we watched the play on a large screen until we could be seated after the first act. About 15 minutes in all.

If we had swum the mile down the Thames instead of walking, we could have covered the distance in 35 minutes, according to Google, but one does not wish to arrive at the theatre soaked to the bone.

All’s Well That Ends Well

Yes, Will Shakespeare had a line—or a play—for pretty much every human situation, and he often used his writing to address the perilous times he lived in. The harassment and murder of Catholics, the torture and imprisonment of those who aided them, the machinations of the queen’s scheming—and greedy—privy council, the quickie trials that mostly favored the prosecution, and the Bubonic Plague.   

We in America face a daunting number of our own challenges at present, those of us who champion democracy and the Constitution, who believe all peoples, whatever their skin color, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender identity deserve respect, healthcare, housing, food, clean water to drink, clean air to breathe, and the freedom to speak their minds. In a nation of such immense wealth—albeit much of it hoarded by the greedy few—anything less is an abomination.

But if we persist. And persist. Keep putting one foot in front of the other, demand something better from our elected leaders—and elect different, better leaders—we just might make it.

Ed and I agreed that Richard II was worth the hassles and frustration. As great as Shakespeare is, though, how much more precious and worth the effort is our democracy?

Well, as I’m off on another trip to London, I’m leaving you with a post penned after my trip two years ago to that wonderful city. And a very salient post it is. A post about those who bravely fought for freedom in the face of fascism. Who put themselves at risk to save the lives of their fellow human beings. I found their stories incredibly uplifting. I hope you will, too.

During my recent trip to London, I saw a new play, Glory Ride, about a remarkable Italian cyclist, Gino Bartali, two-time winner of the Tour de France. But it wasn’t Bartali’s athletic achievements that made him remarkable. Or worthy of the tribute this play bestows. It was something far more significant. Courage. Bartali cycled thousands of miles across his native Italy during World War II, smuggling falsified ID documents that enabled Jews and other persecuted peoples to flee the country, escaping certain death at the hands of the Nazis.

Courage. Google’s English Dictionary defines it as the ability to do something that frightens one. We celebrate those who can summon such bravery, who literally lay their life on the line for their principles. And wonder if we would come up to the mark in the face of such a daunting challenge.

Courage. One stands at the crossroads at a moment in time, without any assurance of the outcome, and commits to this: Do or die. In those fleeting minutes, when a decision must be made, what factors determine the path we will take?

Because We Possess The Ability

Gino Bartali, a native Florentine, won his first Tour de France in 1938, the year Italian dictator Benito Mussolini began to enforce antisemitic legislation based on Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws. When Italy entered World War II on the side of the Fascists in 1940, Bartali was called up to serve, but an irregular heartbeat saved him from combat duty. Instead, he served as an army messenger, bicycling across Italy to deliver military missives. This not only allowed him to continue training and racing, it made him the ideal candidate to carry secret documents that would save hundreds of lives, the majority of them children.  

The Cardinal of Tuscany, Elia Dalla Costa, approached Bartali in 1943. The Jewish families and children he was hiding in various Franciscan convents needed forged travel papers to escape. His friend, Giorgio Nissim, a Jewish accountant, could produce the documents, but he needed photographs of the fugitives. Could Bartali regularly bike to Assisi, under the guise of training, to collect the photos, bring them back to Nissim, then deliver the finished docs to the escapees?

Now, having won the Tour de France, Bartali was a beloved son of the Italian people, but it had not escaped the authorities’ notice that he was no fan of Mussolini or Hitler. German troops were not anxious to incur the riots his arrest would arouse, but they were keeping a close eye on him. And the cardinal’s request would bring certain death were Bartali’s real mission discovered.

In the play, Bartali has his moment of wishing that the cup might pass from him, that he be spared this choice. We cannot know what he actually experienced, but he was a healthy 29-year-old, recently married with, as they say, everything to live for. Still, he understood the situation: Many innocent people would be savagely murdered without his help. So, he figured out a way to hide the photos, the forged ID cards, the exit docs inside the frame of his bike. And off he rode. Day after day.

In July 1944, disaster struck as the organization the Jewish accountant Nissim worked for was rounded up by the Nazis and sent to concentration camps. Only Nissim escaped arrest. He immediately went to work rebuilding the network. Soon after, Bartali himself was hauled in by the Germans. Why was Bartali riding all over Italy? They demanded. The war had cancelled virtually all cycling races, so what exactly was he training for? Why should he not be killed here and now?

Bartali admitted nothing. Not the photos or the forged travel docs. Not the dozens of Jews he’d driven to freedom in the Swiss Alps, stowed away in a secret compartment of the small wagon he claimed to pull for “strength training.” Nor the Jewish family—old friends—he was hiding in his cellar.

We will never know whether his silence would have bought him more time or been the last straw that prompted some Nazi officer to pull the trigger then and there, because that day, one of the men among Bartali’s interrogators was his former army commander. They had been friends of a sort during Bartali’s service and the man convinced the Nazis that the cyclist was innocent.

Bartali would go on to save some 800 lives during the war and win a second Tour de France (1948) before dying peacefully at age 85.

Because We Are In The Right Place

When Miep Gies set up an interview with Otto Frank for a position in the company he managed, she had no idea what the job would one day ask of her.  

It was 1933, and Frank himself had just moved to Amsterdam from Germany to run the new Dutch arm of Opekta, a pectin and spice company. Adolf Hitler had come to power, the Nazi movement was growing rapidly, and Frank, a Jew, desperately wanted to get his family out of their native country, a goal he realized the following year when his wife and two daughters, Margot and Anne, joined him in the Dutch capital.

For five years, the plan worked, but then World War II exploded and eight months later the Germans invaded the Netherlands. They began rounding up Dutch Jews and shipping them to Nazi concentration camps. Though Miep was not Jewish, the Nazis took her passport after she refused to join the Nazi women’s association, and she was told she would be deported back to her native Austria (which had been annexed by Germany in 1938.) Determined to remain in the Netherlands, Gies and her Dutch lover, Jan, decided to marry so she would be granted Dutch citizenship. They were wed in July 1941.

It seemed disaster had been averted. Until the following June, when papers arrived for Margot Frank, Anne’s sister, ordering her to report for forced labor in Germany. To save their elder daughter, the Frank family, along with the family of Otto’s business associate and a local dentist—all Jews—hid themselves in an attic apartment adjacent to the Opekta operation. Their survival would now depend on help from others who would also risk arrest—and worse—if discovered.

What could Miep do? Otto Frank had been good to her. They had been neighbors, too, before the Franks were forced to hide. And she hated everything the Nazis stood for. She was scared, but everyone was scared. She and Jan, along with three other Opekta employees put their own lives on the line, smuggling food and other supplies to the secret apartment. For the next two years, Miep made multiple shopping trips daily, sourcing food from different places, delivering her supplies only after the Opekta workers had left for the day—not everyone was unsympathetic to the Nazis or willing to risk their lives. As the months became a year, then two years, the tension must have been exhausting, but Miep never wavered.

And then the hammer fell. On August 4, 1944, a Gestapo officer stormed into Miep’s office, waving a gun. Someone had tipped him off about the Jews hiding in the apartment. The Franks and their friends had been arrested. The officer now arrested Miep and two of her co-workers who had been assisting the family. Miep recognized the officer’s accent—he was Viennese. When she told him she, too, had been born in Vienna, he took pity on her and let her go. It was a one in a million chance, but it saved her from prison and the labor camps.

As soon as the Gestapo left, Miep rushed to the Frank’s apartment to rescue Anne’s diaries—the ones Miep knew she had been keeping throughout their confinement. The Franks were sent to Auschwitz. Later, Margot and Anne would be sent on to Bergen-Belsen. The only one to survive the war was Otto Frank when Auschwitz was liberated in 1945 by Soviet soldiers. On his return to Amsterdam, Miep gave him his daughter’s writings. These would become the book Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, a book that would be translated into more than 70 languages and sell over 30 million copies. It remains one of the most widely-read non-fiction books in the world.

Because There is No Other Choice

As noted up top, courage is about acting when the stakes are high but the outcome of our effort—at great personal risk—uncertain. Will we be able to change anything about the situation, or are we potentially sacrificing ourselves for nothing when we might have escaped the ordeal altogether? But let’s ratchet up the stakes another notch: What if there is no possible escape, only a temporary postponement of the inevitable if we don’t find the courage to act?     

That’s the question Alexei Ananenko, Valeri Bespalov, and Boris Baranov faced on May 4, 1986, just days after one of the four nuclear reactors at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, releasing radioactive fallout 400 times more deadly than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in World War II. Two of the plant’s workers died instantly. Another 28 would succumb from acute radiation syndrome by month’s end, and 350,000 people from the surrounding area had to be evacuated.   

Within six hours of the explosion, all the fires had been extinguished. Everything seemed under control, the damage contained. But then it was discovered that the water firefighters had pumped into the reactor had also flooded the basement beneath. That water was now radioactive. And the Unit 4 reactor was continuing to melt down, burning its way through the concrete slab that divided it from that radioactive water. If the melting reactor came into contact with the water, the resulting explosion would wipe much of Europe off the map for the next half-million years. The stakes don’t get much higher than that. Nor does the risk.

The only hope was to find the valves in the flooded basement and manually turn them off, thus draining the toxic pool of water beneath the reactor before the concrete slab was breached. Ananenko, Bespalov, and Baranov did not know what they would find in the basement, the extent of the damage, or whether their efforts could affect the outcome, but dressed in wetsuits, wearing respirators, and carrying flashlights, down they went, with assurances their families would be looked after if they perished. It was not reassuring.

The water was not deep, but the basement was a dark, twisting maze of pipes and valves. Seconds stretched to minutes—each minute bringing the molten reactor core closer to burning through the slab. Where was it—this one valve that would prevent total disaster if they could only find it in time?

Well, obviously, they did find it. Turned it off. Saved a significant portion of the world. And all three lived to tell the tale. In recent years, Ananenko, asked to recall the moment, has tended to downplay the heroics of what they did. We were doing our job, he has said.

In my book, that’s still courage.     

Because We Can No Longer Remain Silent

Malala Yousafzai was born in Pakistan in 1997. When she was ten, the Taliban seized power in her section of the country. By 2009, they had outlawed education for females and blown up more than a hundred girls’ schools to make their point. Malala, who had dreamed of becoming a doctor, was furious. Her father, Ziaudin, empathized with his daughter’s anger at this huge injustice. As a teacher, he had founded a co-educational school. It was his vision that every woman who wanted an education should have one. He deplored illiteracy. Hated the idea that women should be hidden from the public eye, trapped at home to cook and clean for their brothers, fathers and, eventually, husbands. He wanted more, much more, for Malala.

“Speak out,” Ziaudin told his daughter. So Malala began taking her crusade to the people. “How dare the Taliban take away my basic right to education,” she declared in 2008, during a speech to the local press club in Peshawar. The newspapers and TV stations ate it up. Soon after, BBC Urdu, a digital TV station covering India and Pakistan, came looking for a school-age girl to blog anonymously about her life under the Taliban. Their Peshawar correspondent got in touch with one of the local teachers—Malala’s dad, Ziauddin. Did he know any female students who would agree to be their blogger? Ziauddin asked around, but the girls’ families were fearful. Too risky, they said. And that was how Malala began blogging for BBC Urdu. She wrote notes under the pseudonym Gul Makai and gave them to a BBC reporter to post. As she penned her first post in January 2009, her school has just been forcibly shut down:    

I had a terrible dream yesterday with military helicopters and the Taliban. I have had such dreams since the launch of the military operation in Swat. My mother made me breakfast and I went off to school. I was afraid going to school because the Taliban had issued an edict banning all girls from attending schools. Only 11 out of 27 pupils attended the class… My three friends have shifted to Peshawar, Lahore and Rawalpindi with their families after this edict.

It was an amazingly courageous act for a girl still shy of her twelfth birthday, but it was just the beginning of Malala’s public campaign. The year 2009 saw the Pakistan Armed Forces wage a protracted battle to drive out the Taliban. Spring became summer as the fighting continued. Many local people had fled the area, but Malala and her family remained. She became a peer educator for the Institute of War and Peace Reporting’s “Open Minds Pakistan” youth program, working with local students to help them engage in thoughtful discussion, via journalism, discourse and public debate, on the issues they faced. That same summer, a New York Times’ correspondent, Adam B. Ellick, made a documentary, Class Dismissed, about Malala’s life and work. Her public profile mushroomed. No more hiding behind a pseudonym. Now, Malala gave interviews in print and on TV. Desmond Tutu nominated her for the International Children’s Peace Prize, and she was awarded Pakistan’s National Youth Peace Prize.

The Taliban, suppressed but not eradicated, watched in fury from the sidelines. Lessons of History #1: Armies may be defeated (for a time), but ideas do not die. Just as there are those who will always champion democracy and a just world for all people, there are those who will always promote fascism and a fierce tribalism. On October 9, 2012, fifteen-year-old Malala was riding the bus on her way home from school when a member of the Taliban forced his way onto the vehicle and shot her in the head. She was airlifted to a hospital in Peshawar, then moved to an intensive care unit in Birmingham, England for surgery. For a while, it was touch and go as to whether she would survive, but Malala pulled through.

The attempt on her life brought an immediate and global wave of support for her and condemnation of the Taliban. Some two million people signed a petition, leading to the ratification of Pakistan’s first Right to Education Bill. The Taliban threatened a second assassination attempt to “finish the job”, but Malala was not deterred. Nine months after the shooting, she gave a speech before the United Nations urging world leaders to champion the rights of women, especially their right to an education. She and her father launched the Malala Fund, an international non-profit org to fight for this goal. In 2014, Malala became the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. A year later, the Malala Fund opened a school in Lebanon for Syrian refugee girls ages 14-18.  

Malala finished high school in England and went on to earn a B.A. in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford, but she has not forgotten the millions of girls around the globe who are prevented from making their own choices and determining the course of their lives. She continues to speak out for their rights.    

Because It Is The Right Thing To Do

All the heroes in this account were born “ordinary” people. Even Gino Bartali, who gained renown as a cyclist, was born a poor man’s son and worked the fields alongside his family. What they did possess in common was an unshakeable sense of right and wrong—what is fair, what is just—and the determination to act on their beliefs. That is what made them extraordinary.

One stands at the crossroads at a moment in time, without any assurance of the outcome or guarantees for their personal safety, and commits to this: Do or die. Leaving unspoken the most pressing question: If not me, then who?

  

Forty years ago, when I was a young twenty-something, I wrote a poem that began with the question: What motivates one man to build a bomb while another plants a garden?

The question was not meant to isolate a gender. Man could just as easily have been person. Nor was it confined to the activities of weapons-making and horticulture. I might have asked what motivates one person to start a private equity firm that systematically destroys the livelihood of tens of thousands of workers, while another person creates a non-profit charity that has fed hundreds of millions of people in crisis worldwide?

Greed vs. Generosity

In this case, the first person is Mitt Romney (former Utah senator and one-time presidential candidate who lost to Obama in 2012), co-founder and former CEO of Bain Capital, a private equity firm that bought up companies in trouble for cheap, in deals that then loaded up those companies with more debt, resulting in many of the businesses being stripped down for parts, and the assets sold off at a profit—a profit for Bain—not infrequently leaving workers without jobs, healthcare coverage, or the pension funds they’d earned, as Romney and his partners reaped millions.

The second person, the “gardener”, is José Andrés, born in Spain where he trained as a chef before coming to America at the age of 21. Soon after settling in Washington, DC, Andrés began volunteering at DC Central Kitchen, an org whose mission states: We believe that hunger is a symptom of the deeper problem of poverty, and that food is our chosen tool for changing individual lives while addressing systemic failures. Andrés credits DC Central Kitchen with inspiring him to do philanthropy on a BIG scale. In 2010, he started World Central Kitchen in the aftermath of a massive earthquake in Haiti, bringing in supplies and making huge vats of food for the many people who had lost everything in the disaster. That was Andrés’s first foray into charitable work on a global scale but not his last. WCK has kept right on feeding hungry, destitute millions around the world in areas decimated by natural disaster or war for fifteen years. Last year, alone, Andrés and company provided more than 109 million meals in 20 countries. 

Destroying vs. Healing

I could also have asked:

What motivates the CEOs of Big Oil to continue exploiting Earth’s fossil fuels, knowing from their own research, from their own scientists, that climate change is real and that the continued burning of these fuels will cause—is causing—severe damage to the planet? To then bury that research and create a counternarrative, a wildly dangerous lie, to confuse people and block climate action by Congress…      

While Alaskan paramedic-turned-nurse Teresa Gray and her team of licensed medical volunteers travel the globe to provide free medical care to victims of natural disasters and political upheavals. Mobile Medics International, as Gray’s nonprofit is called, even went to Romania to treat some of the 4.6 million Ukrainian war refugees forced to flee their homes in what the United Nations has called “the world’s fastest-growing refugee crisis since World War II.”

But poetry demands an economy of words, a concise symbolic representation of a larger concept: evil versus good, greed versus generosity, a disregard for those who suffer versus a desire to work for the common welfare.       

Four Traits of the Kindhearted

So, the real question my poem asks could be posed thus: What motivates one person to be grasping and greedy, heedless of who they hurt or how, while another person seeks to alleviate suffering wherever and to whomever it occurs? From observation and experience, I believe the person who feels no need to crush others, no need to “outdo” them in wealth or power, who is generous with their time, resources, and talents—I believe that person possesses four key certainties or traits:    

1. They know what is enough. That if you have a safe place to live, three square meals a day, access to medical care, and some income, you have enough.
2. They know what truly matters. Life matters. People, the health of the planet—its oceans, forests, lakes, rivers, and all its living creatures. These are what matter, not the money or the power to rape the planet and crush others.
3. They know the real source of joy. Family, friends, neighbors, community.
4. They know they are enough. They don’t need to provoke envy—look at me!—or diminish others to make themselves appear more powerful, more important.

In gathering examples of generosity and avarice, I came across a definition of greed and its causes I believe hits the proverbial nail squarely on the head: Greed is the desire to have everything for yourself and to prevent others from having a fair share. And just below that: Causes of greed include egocentrism, insecurity, and individualism.

Yep, that about sums it up, but it begs the question: How do we, as individuals, grow up to be the destroyer or the nurturer? Are we hard-wired from Day 1 to be grasping or generous? It’s a question psychologists and neuroscientists have long been interested in, and as brain research has advanced in the past decade or so, we are starting to get some answers.

When All Is Said And Done

In researching that question, I waded through about a zillion pages of findings on the subject—for example, The Neuroscience of Generosity: Synchronization of specific brain regions predicts generous behavior in monkeys. This Yale University study shows the marked suppression of neural synchronicity between the amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex in monkeys when they engage in selfish and antisocial behavior. Generous behavior occurs when these same regions of the brain show synchronization. Reflecting on the findings, senior author and assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Yale, Steve Chang, observed: “We all know there are individual differences in levels of generosity. Maybe Scrooge did not have high levels of synchrony after all.”

And this insightful tidbit from the study, A neural perspective on when and why trait greed comes at the expense of others, where co-authors Patrick Mussel and Johannes Hewig write: “Here, we show that trait greed predicts selfish economic decisions that come at the expense of others in a resource dilemma. This effect was amplified [my emphasis] when individuals strived for obtaining real money, as compared to points, and when their revenue was at the expense of another person, as compared to a computer.” 

It’s fascinating stuff, but at the risk of running to thousands of words here, I will close this post with two observations I believe get to the heart or, rather, the heartlessness of the matter:

#1 Big Oil knows what fossil fuels are doing to the planet, the threat they pose to all living creatures. They simply don’t care.

#2 I believe Dr. Seuss [Theodor Geisel], in his beloved children’s classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, nailed the root of the problem in words any five-year-old could understand regarding why the Grinch hated Christmas and all the happy revelers down in Whoville: 

“It could be his head wasn’t screwed on just right.
It could be, perhaps his shoes were too tight.
But I think that the most likely reason of all
May have been that his heart was two sizes too small.”

Thank you, Dr. Seuss, for the answer to my poem.

The Martian is a sci-fi film starring Matt Damon, adapted from the novel by Andy Weir. It was released in the U.S. in late 2015, but I would first see it in the winter of 2017, after He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named had slithered into the Oval Office for the first time. The film felt like a gift from Sanity Central. It spoke so eloquently, so truthfully to what it takes to survive disaster.

In February of this year, history having repeated itself, our situation even darker, the threat more malignant, I pulled out the DVD and popped it in the player. I needed that film. Needed to be reminded of the truth it speaks, the human condition it addresses, the strength and hope it inspires. Weir’s astronaut Mark Watney may be a fictional character, but his methods for coping with and ultimately transcending a very dark experience have much of value to teach us.   

The Moment Everything Explodes

Mark Watney (Damon) and his fellow astronauts are in the middle of their mission to explore the Acidalia Planitia—a vast flat plane on Mars that scientists posit may once have contained a large body of water—when a monstrous dust storm erupts, threatening their Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) and forcing them to abandon the mission or risk certain death. The crew rushes to safety inside the MAV III, but a quick headcount reveals they’re one short. Watney is missing. Checking the monitors for the surrounding area, they see Watney in the swirling dust, flattened by a chunk of debris. Mission Commander, Jessica Chastain, wants to rescue him, but the storm is intensifying. Every second counts. They must leave now. Reluctantly, she launches the MAV III to rendezvous with their orbiting spaceship, the Hermes. Time to head back to Earth. She cannot risk the rest of her crew to save one man, a man who appears to be dead.

A Brutal Awakening

But Watney is not dead. He awakens hours later to find himself injured and his oxygen tank nearly spent. He hobbles back to the “Hab”, where the crew lived, ups his oxygen and applies antibiotics to the wound in his stomach. But his physical pain pales beside what he knows to be the truth of his situation: He is stranded on Mars with a minimal amount of food and water, no way to get in touch with his crewmates or NASA mission control, 140 million miles from Earth. Because everyone will assume he’s dead, he will have to wait for the next Mars mission, scheduled to arrive four Earth years from now and 2,000 miles away at Mars’ Schiaparelli crater.

He starts a video diary, figuring if he doesn’t make it, someone may still find the journal and know what he did to try to survive. Because that is his intention: To survive. It’s either that or lay down and die right now. Any way you look at it, he has nothing to lose by trying.

One, the Loneliest Number

I think we can all agree it doesn’t get any darker, any scarier than the situation Watney awakes to. The threats we face in this moment are many and undeniably serious: We might lose our healthcare (ACA, Medicaid, Medicare); our job, especially if we work for the federal government (this happened to someone I know); our Social Security. A drastic reduction in income might mean we lose our home. And losing our healthcare obviously poses serious, even life-threatening dangers (more on this later). In such times, it’s hard to focus on anything but our fears, to feel anything other than distress, but I think we can all agree that we have been spared the worst fate. Unlike Watney, we are not alone. So, what can we do? Again, The Martian has something useful to teach us.    

Assessing The Situation

Food, water, shelter. The most basic and vital of needs. Abandoned at the midpoint of the mission, Watney has the Hab for shelter, but a very limited supply of food and potable water. Maybe 6-8 weeks’ worth because the rations were intended for a larger crew. Certainly nothing like the four years’ supply he will need. Thus begins his assessment, which leads to taking action on the most immediate problems.

His check of the food stock reveals a bit of luck—a stash of potatoes reserved for an upcoming Thanksgiving meal for the crew. As a botanist, he knows you can plant whole or parts of potatoes that have “eyes” (sprouted) and reap new ones. The Martian soil will need to be fertilized, however, for the potatoes to grow. Fortunately, the crew’s bio-waste stored in the Hab will work. He tills the soil, mixing in the human waste, but he still needs water. This he accomplishes by extracting the hydrogen from the leftover rocket fuel and burning it with oxygen. Voila—water!  His giant field of potatoes will thrive.

Assessing his situation, exploring what is at hand, acting on the possibilities gives him purpose, calms his fears, and enhances his chance of survival. A win-win which brings some real light into a very dark situation.

What We Can Do   

Give up and wait for doom OR be proactive and fight for our rights, our healthcare, our environment, our schools, the Social Security we’ve paid into all our working lives, our very democracy itself—that’s the choice we all face. Watney had no line of communication, but we do. We can contact our elected officials—our U.S. senators and reps. Even if they’re lackeys to Trump, especially if they’re lackeys, let them know in stark detail the harm you, your loved ones, and your community are facing, how you feel. And don’t overlook your state senators and reps. My state rep, Lindsay Sabadosa, has been a tremendous help on several occasions, once cutting through bureaucratic red tape during The Plague and telling a local business that was refusing to follow new state policies that they must do so—it was the law. And they did. Pronto.

If your U.S congressperson hasn’t offered a Town Hall since Trump’s inauguration, demand one now. It’s your right. Get your neighbors and friends to do the same. Tell any U.S. rep attempting to hide in the shadows while our democracy is dismantled—tell that congressperson THIS WILL NOT DO. In many districts across the country, where Republican congresspersons are refusing to hold a town hall, afraid to confront the anger and distress of the people they supposedly represent, Democrats are stepping in, holding gatherings, packing rooms to the max (sometimes having to relocate to handle the record-breaking crowds), and listening to the fears and grievances of the American people.

Persistence Pays Off 

Having taken care of his basic survival needs, Watney turns his attention to modifying the crew’s rover—a jeeplike vehicle—in preparation for his future trek to the Ares IV MAV at Schiaparelli Crater. He then takes the modified rover on a one-month journey to recover the Pathfinder probe—a communications system from a prior mission that can link him with NASA. He gets Pathfinder up and running. As it turns out, NASA has suspected Watney survived. Satellite images showed that equipment had been moved around near the Hab. But it’s only with Watney’s resurrecting the probe that NASA is able to send a software patch to link the rover to the probe and establish communication.

Yay! Everything’s working out. It’ll be a long wait for the rescue, but the rover’s up and running, he’s in communication with Earth. Things are definitely looking brighter. Patience, hard work and determination win the day!

And then…

Another Disaster

The water-making process Watney uses to grow food releases hydrogen into the Hab’s atmosphere. Over time, a lot of hydrogen. The air in the Hab has become highly flammable. One day while Watney’s going about his chores, a small quantity of oxygen escapes his mask. Yes, oxygen combined with hydrogen forms water as noted above—that’s how Watney’s been growing potatoes—but too much hydrogen explodes when it encounters oxygen. A big bang that blows out the Hab’s airlock, destroying the potato crop in seconds and fracturing one of Watney’s ribs. He can—and does—repair the airlock, but his food supply is just about tapped out. Good thing he’s in touch with NASA now. They quickly arrange to send a shipment of food, enough to last until the Ares IV mission arrives. Relief. Problem solved. BUT. Anxious to get the supplies to Watney, some routine safety inspections are skipped at NASA and the spacecraft disintegrates after launch.

Always Be Prepared

There’s a good reason, as Watney’s story shows, for heeding that old Scout motto: Be prepared. S#*t happens, and the more resources we have to hand, the better our chances of surviving whatever befalls us. Now’s the time to make a list of potential threats you face:

Issue: Losing your healthcare, losing your Social Security or having your student loans suddenly called in, especially if the situation leaves you struggling and possibly homeless. Not many of us have $100,000 lying around for “a rainy day.”

Action: Check with your city/town and state officials regarding measures they may have to prevent you from losing your home if you can no longer afford to pay property taxes. Do the same for medical assistance programs if you lose your healthcare (Medicaid/Medicare). Policies and programs vary from state to state, but it never hurts to know what options/safety nets exist should you need them.

Regarding healthcare, it is a federal law—the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA)—that all hospitals in the U.S. must treat you in the emergency room even if you don’t have insurance, even if you cannot pay, even if you owe them money for prior treatment(s). And they must treat your emergency medical condition before talking money. EMTALA—it’s literally a life saver. And it’s every American’s legal right. 

Issue: Being arrested for exercising your First Amendment Rights to speak out, to participate in a protest or march, to petition the government about policies you find threatening or repugnant, to worship as you choose, or not to worship at all. Being deported because you have the wrong ethnicity, surname or skin color.

Mahmoud Khalil—a Columbia University student and activist in the protests against U.S. support for Israel’s war on the Palestinian people—was snatched from his New York home by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in March and sent more than a thousand miles away to a Louisiana ICE detention facility. Khalil is a green card holder, a lawful permanent resident of the United States—just like Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google (Russian born), Albert Einstein (German born) and … Elon Musk, Trump’s South African-born henchman for dismantling our democracy.   

Trump is alleging they have the right to deport Khalil without charging him with a crime because his presence here could pose “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” Oh, right.

Khalil’s lawyers—and the list reads like the Dream Team of civil rights’ defenders (Amy Greer from Dratel & Lewis, the Center for Constitutional Rights, CLEAR, the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), the American Civil Liberties Union, and Alina Das, co-director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at New York University School of Law)—maintain the government is acting to punish protected political speech. If it were to succeed, it would set a dangerous precedent. “I think what’s so scary about this and what people need to realize, is the fact that you can kidnap someone basically from their home for going to a protest. That’s terrifying.” Khalil’s wife, Abdalla, said.

Action: Hopefully, you’ll never need it, but now is the time to pull together a list of people and organizations you can turn to for help in any civil rights’ crisis that may arise in this Brave New World:

• American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
• Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)
• Lambda Legal (defenders of LGBTQ+ rights)
• American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee
• Human Rights Campaign (HRC)
• NAACP
• National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights            

Alone No More            

After NASA’s emergency provisions spacecraft fails, the China National Space Administration offers to send a launch vehicle to resupply Watney. But NASA astrodynamicist Rich Purnell has a better plan: Use the Chinese launch to resupply Watney’s crewmates heading home on the Hermes. They can then turn around and rescue their friend two years ahead of the Ares IV landing! It’s brilliant, but NASA director Teddy Sanders isn’t happy. He fears distracting Watney’s crewmates will compromise the original mission and endanger their safe return. One of Sanders’ people risks the boss’s wrath and informs the Hermes crew of the proposed rescue plan. They all vote YES!        

So, at last, everything’s in place for the rescue, or almost. Watney sets off for the Schiaparelli crater where he’ll use the Ares IV MAV to lift off the surface and rendezvous with the Hermes spacecraft. When he arrives several months later, he must still make modifications to the MAV. It will require more fuel and oxygen if it’s to reach the necessary altitude. He also needs to lighten the craft, which means partly dismantling it—losing what is not absolutely essential. He sets to work and at last the big day arrives.

He takes off, but as the MAV runs out of fuel, it loses speed, putting it out of sync with the Hermes. Determined to rescue her teammate and friend, the Hermes Commander sets off an explosive device to rupture a forward airlock. The tremendous release of air slows down the Hermes, and the Commander launches a special tether to reach Watney, but frustratingly, they can’t quite connect. Does Watney give up hope here—too many problems and he’s tired of fighting? No. Watney tries a different tack. He pierces his pressure suit and the escaping air propels him to the Commander, ending his 575 days alone on Mars. 

Working Together: A Lifeline 

Just as Watney could not ultimately save himself without the help of his friends and fellow astronauts, we cannot hope to save our democracy, our rights and freedoms unless we band together. Rally with others to protest the illegal overturning of our democratic norms, the destruction of our institutions, the threats to our social safety nets, the wrecking of our economy (which no matter what Fox Noise says, was one of the strongest ever under Joe Biden).      

In New York City, from Times Square to Trump Tower, massive protests have taken place to demand the release of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University student activist I mentioned earlier who is being held without charge at a Louisiana ICE detention center.

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Fighting Oligarchy tour is drawing huge crowds everywhere—more than 34,000 in Denver this past month. One of the oligarchs they’re fighting is Elon Musk, and they’re not alone in taking this fight to the people. On March 29, Action Network (AN) hosted a Global Day of Action to stop Elon Musk. “Musk is destroying our democracy, and he’s using the fortune he built at Tesla to do it, ” AN posted on their site. “We are taking action at Tesla to stop Musk’s illegal coup.” Protests against the unelected centibillionaire took place in hundreds of Tesla locations across the U.S. and beyond: Canada, much of northwest Europe, and Australia all hosted rallies!    

As Trump begins his dismantling of the Department of Education, laying off half the staff at the department’s federal office, students, parents and teachers across the nation have taken to the streets to protest the beginning of the end of America’s public school system. The National Education Association, along with the American Federation of Teachers and various civil rights groups, have filed a lawsuit demanding staff be reinstated, asserting that the massive cuts have put student civil rights in jeopardy.  

The above are but a few of the threats that have brought millions to their feet and into the street. The severe cuts to Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, Health and Human Services, Federal Emergency Management (FEMA), the Environmental Protection Agency and many other American institutions that have long served the public interest are also being met with unrelenting backlash.

Not only is it empowering to make your voice heard, but if enough of us refuse to sit quietly while our democracy and its institutions are destroyed for the profit of a handful of billionaires, we just might win!

One Foot in Front of the Other

After many months of hair-raising disasters and having to find new solutions to problems he thought he’d conquered, Watney safely returns to Earth, where he becomes a NASA survival instructor for astronaut candidates. “You solve one problem,” he tells them, “then you solve the next, and if you solve enough of them, you get to come home.” Stay focused, keep fighting, don’t give up: That’s the message The Martian has for us.

As I was mentally outlining this post one evening while watching the news, I scribbled these words on a napkin: There is a future where everyone knows the answers to the questions we’re asking today. We can’t see into that distant moment from where we stand. Like Matt Damon’s astronaut, we can only put one foot in front of the other, strive to solve the most pressing problem of the moment, seek help from others (and offer assistance where we can), and hope it will be enough.

                                                                                                                                                                                         

Eight months after I got my BA in Literature, and two months after I returned to the Midwest from Arizona—having discovered: 1) I do NOT like dry heat, and 2) I NEED green trees, green grass, seasons—I began a Masters in Literature. I was fortunate to be given a graduate teaching assistantship, structuring and leading a writing class for fourteen delightful freshmen. A gig that also covered a significant portion of my tuition and paid the rent for a room in a large boxy house a block from campus. A place I shared with fourteen other young women and men—some students, some working odd jobs until they figured out next steps. The usual college town scene.  

Two of my housemates—Kevin and Connor—were into cooking, and as the house had a vast kitchen in the lower level, complete with a lengthy trestle table, they began cooking dinners several nights a week. Anyone from the house could partake of the meal if they pitched in a dollar. That’s right, one dollar to help cover the cost of groceries. And, if you didn’t have that dollar, you could still eat. All you had to do was go to the market two streets over and bring home the ingredients, as I did twice during the summer of ’78 before I got a part-time gig at a Joann Fabrics store—no stipends for grad students during the summer session.

Lest this generosity and communal bonhomie appear specific to my housemates, I can assure you it wasn’t. The late ‘70s were a time of community. Hungry? I’ve got a can of soup we can share. No place to crash? I’ve got a sleeping bag and an extra pillow. You can stay at my place. Need a doctor? The free medical clinic was tucked among the bookstores, music venues, and mini marts that define a college town. Everyone went there, and it was the consensus among former and current students that the care we received there was superior to the university’s health services. I used the clinic twice and received prompt, courteous, top-quality care both times.  

The Backlash Begins

I remember thinking that ours would be the generation that would end hunger and homelessness, provide quality healthcare to everyone. After all, the decade before had seen the passing of The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and The Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Social Security Amendments of 1965 gave us both Medicare and Medicaid. Yes, we were building a new world, one that would make good on the promises of a true democracy, an America governed by the people and for the people as Abraham Lincoln said at Gettysburg. At its heart would lie that most basic of human truths: We are all depending on one another.

Sadly, the following decades were to prove me wrong, as Reagan’s “Morning in America” began the long eclipse of all that had flourished in the ‘60s and ‘70s, as we watched our best hopes smothered beneath a rollback of rights and cutbacks to domestic programs. All in service to hedge funds, private equity groups, and the billionaires who run them. (Sound familiar?)

I was reminded of this last fall when a bout of sciatica made walking painful and stairs almost unnavigable just days before we were to travel to Rome. I arrived at my local hospital’s emergency room, hobbling, my whole left hip/leg in agony. In the two hours I was there, the only person I saw was the one who showed up five minutes after I arrived to take my credit card info for my ER co-pay. She returned ninety minutes later to give me a shot “for the pain.” The pain remained. This is the kind of “service” I received and I have health insurance.  

As I sat…and sat in the ER that morning, I recalled a very different experience from my early post-student days. I had developed a fever, but being generally very healthy, I chalked it up to “just something” that would quickly pass. It didn’t and by the time a friend stopped by several days later, I was slightly delirious. She drove me to the emergency room of the local hospital where my temp registered 104 degrees. “Why did you wait so long?” The ER doctor admonished me. “You could have lost a kidney!” I started to cry. “I don’t have any money right now,” I sobbed, “I can’t pay.” They treated me and never charged for the visit.

Healthcare Now

According to the Office of Health Policy (under HHS), 11.5 percent of adults in the U.S. lacked health insurance in the first quarter of 2024. I love percentages, don’t you—the way they transform real suffering on the ground into a neat, faceless mathematical expression. So let me put that statement into human terms: A year ago, more than 27 million people lacked health insurance. Their only option? Community health centers, if they were lucky to live near one.

But such health centers rely to a huge extent on federal funding. The very funding that TheRUMP announced he was freezing on January 23. Grants, loans, financial assistance. Thousands of organizations were affected. Thousands of community programs. Head Start, cancer research, Meals on Wheels, mental health programs, housing assistance, natural disaster aid, public schools, and a whole slew of other public-service programs—funded by our tax dollars—including hospitals and healthcare centers. All funding to be paused for such orgs until it could be determined whether they might conflict with the president’s “agenda.”   

“Dangerous, Illegal and Unconstitutional”  

As the Associated Press put it (in the understatement of the year), “the order capped the most chaotic day for the U.S. government since Trump returned to office.” Reaction was swift. Less than 24 hours after the nationwide funding freeze was announced, U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan, granted an administrative stay in a case brought by the National Council of Nonprofits. Trump could not freeze the funds until further review, she ordered.

A second U.S. district judge, John McConnell, Jr., at the request of 23 Democratic state attorneys general, echoed AliKhan’s ruling, issuing a temporary block on the funding freeze, saying it appeared to violate the law. “The Executive cites no legal authority allowing it to do so; indeed, no federal law would authorize the Executive’s unilateral action here,” McConnell stated.  New York Attorney General Letitia James agreed: “There is no question this policy is reckless, dangerous, illegal and unconstitutional.”

Despite these rulings, the funds and grants remained frozen, the Democratic state attorneys general reported in early February, calling on McConnell to enforce his earlier temporary restraining order. McConnell agreed and blocked the funding freeze, declaring it unconstitutional. “[It] has caused and continues to cause irreparable harm to a vast portion of this country,” he noted.

As of this writing, federal funding and grants appear to remain frozen.

Gimme Shelter: Poverty Becomes A Crime 

Giving shelter—a cot, a sofa, a sleeping bag on the floor—to a friend who is out of work and can’t pay rent or a friend of a friend “between places”—that may still happen. I hope it still happens. In my senior year of college, we sheltered a friend of one of my roommates for a whole semester as she waited for a grant to come through. There were also public shelters back then. Places that offered a large room—fifty or so cots, bathrooms, often a soup kitchen staffed by volunteers. People need a roof over their head. They need a warm, dry place to sleep, a toilet, a shower. Because for chrissake, we are all human beings. And one human being does not leave another to freeze or starve.

Except now it seems we do. In 2024, over 770,000 people—that we know of—were homeless. That’s an 18% increase from 2023, itself a 12% increase from 2022, and the highest number since the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) started counting in 2007. At the same time, the number of Community Housing and Homeless Shelters has dropped by 2.2.% in the past year. You don’t have to be a math whiz to know that a drop in the number of shelters during the single largest increase in the number of people without a home spells despair, illness, even death for hundreds of thousands.       

So, if there are not enough shelters, where do these unfortunate people go? Where do they sleep? Good question. Until recently, it was the case that people without housing and no access to a shelter slept in tents in public spaces, laid out a pillow, maybe a blanket, on a park bench. If they were fortunate enough to still have wheels, they slept in their car. Some still might, but a purported wave of public antipathy toward the homeless brought a number of lawsuits last year demanding homelessness be made a crime.   

I detailed this in my September post “The Madness of Money.” Suffice it to say that in June 2024, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that cities can ban the homeless from sleeping and “camping” in public spaces. (Wouldn’t want the good, upstanding folk to have to witness such “unpleasantness.”) This SCOTUS ruling, in a case brought by the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, overturned lower court decisions that found criminalizing homelessness to be “cruel and unusual” under the Eighth Amendment. After all, people must sleep. And if one has no options for lodging, what can one do?

The “kindly” officials of Grants Pass had an answer: Pay a $295 fine. And if they catch you sleeping rough again, you’ll be criminally prosecuted and spend a month in jail! Grants Pass claimed the previous rulings encouraged homelessness (as if this were something ‘desirable’ many people aspire to). As I pointed out in my post, people sleep rough because they don’t have $295. I strongly suspect if they had somewhere better to go, they would go there. And if a city, any city, has the money to imprison innocent people down on their luck, it could use those same funds to help them. Unfortunately, since the ruling, more than 100 cities have made it illegal to sleep outside. In California’s San Joaquin County, violators can be fined up to $1,000 and six months in jail. It will hardly surprise anyone that TheRUMP supports these bans.

What the World Needs Now     

In the closing days of the Biden-Harris Administration, then-U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy sat down with Time magazine’s senior health correspondent, Alice Park, to offer Americans “a parting prescription” as he put it, to address “the deeper pain, the unhappiness I was seeing for years across the country” based on his many conversations with Americans from all walks of life. Conversations that spanned his two terms of service, first under President Obama, then under Biden.

What Murthy discovered in those talks is that “for many people, [the] sense of community has eroded.” Millions of Americans are suffering from loneliness. Citing a recent survey, he expressed concern: “More than half of young adults …said they felt low or no sense of meaning and purpose in their lives.”

Murthy’s prescription? Rebuild what we have seemingly lost: Community. “Community is a place where we have relationships, help each other, and where we find purpose in each other,” he said. “Those three elements are the core pillars…” And those pillars, he stressed, are braced by love. Love fuels generosity, kindness, and courage. “When you put these together, then you have a place where people find a sense of belonging and meaning.”

A Caring Human Being

This past December, our car began making a horrendous clanking noise when starting up. I thought maybe the dealership had forgotten to top the anti-freeze when they replenished all the fluids last summer. After a week of this, Ed took the car to a local gas station where he filled up the tank, then asked the attendant to please check the fluids as we had concerns about the engine and wanted to make sure it was okay before driving to the airport the next day to pick up my son for the holidays. “What?!” the attendant snarled. “I’m not gonna send someone out in this weather (a sunny December day, low 30s) just to check your fluids!”

Ed then took the car to Ren’s, a neighborhood mechanic we trust. Ren checked all the fluid levels, found everything in order, and relieved our worries, assuring Ed it was simply a reaction to the low nighttime temps we’d been having for the past week. Sure enough, when the temps rose a bit, the car expressed its gratitude with perfect silence. And what did Ren charge for the time he spent going over the car? He charged NOTHING. He just did it because we had concerns. Because he didn’t want to send someone off to possibly experience a breakdown, or worse on a busy highway. Because he is a caring human being.                        

You don’t have to know someone to know what hunger is, what illness is, how frightening homelessness is. To offer a hand, to advocate for others, to stand up for justice for all. At the personal level, at the societal level, at the global level, we MUST take care of one another.