Tomorrow, I’m going to spend the day in Albany, I’m going to meet an old man from Iraq, Ali says he needs my help.
Ali and I have this understanding, he looks for refugees and immigrants who need help and have nowhere else to go. We have small resources, but sometimes they can bring great help.
This is a time of great need for the refugees. The state and federal and city governments have no money they are cutting back their programs. The old man from Iraq is taking a language class at RISSE, the refugee and immigrant support center.
They can help the old man learn English, but they can’t give him the money he needs to put a deposit down on an apartment. As a non-profit, they can’t give people cash.
I don’t know the old name’s name, Ali called and asked me if I can help him.
Ali guesses he is in his 60’s but he looks much older. He was in a refugee camp for some years.
He came from Iraq a year or two ago, but he is sick with heart disease and can’t work many hours. He has no surviving family, he has a horror story from Iraq, he came to Los Angeles, but he could not afford to live there, it was more expensive than he ever imagined.
He came to Albany because he heard it was less expensive. He has been living with several other refugees who offered him shelter in the cold, but now he must find his own place to live.
The city says it cannot help him unless he finds work, but no one will hire him, they say he is too old and too frail. He owns nothing.
If he cannot find the money for a deposit, he will have nowhere to live and nowhere to turn. Ali has a big heart and he asked if I could meet this man and see if there is any way we could help him. I will find out if I can.
This is what I started doing this work to do, to commit small acts of great kindness. The refugees are beginning to hear of the Army of Good, Ali says they sometimes whisper to one another about it, they aren’t sure of what it is.
I know to stay small, we are not a huge organization, we don’t have a lot of money, we can’t work miracles or alter destinies.
But we can fill the small holes and help. We got a young woman enough money to buy some car insurance, and get a job. We helped a mother pay off college loans. We brought groceries to a half-dozen families who were hungry. We are bringing a used Ipad to Ali tomorrow, and paying the last of the cost of the van.
I’m hoping there is a way to help this old man (I bet he is younger than me, some of the refugees get old fast). I hope there is a small way to give him comfort and support. Then, he is on his own. There are a lot of people in this world who need help.
But this is the kind of work I wanted to do, and Ali’s roots run deep in this community. I love us, a Jew and a Muslim joining together to do some good. There is hope in the world. This is what I set out to do a year ago. It has taken this long to truly get there. I’m bringing my camera.
I think the most important words I have learned on my long and bumpy hero journey are “I don’t know.” I have learned that true wisdom is understanding what I don’t know rather than what I am certain I know.
In my time as a journalist who often interviewed brilliant people, I was surprised to see that every single one of them knew how to listen and say the world “I don’t know” to questions everyone else always answered. The smart people learn by not knowing.
The insecure and the fearful and the angry can’t say those words, they think they have to have the answers to every question.
That is the sickness of the left and the right, of our crippled political system. Everyone knows everything, no one can ever say they don’t know, so they have no need to listen or bend. Every conversation is an argument, not a dialogue. People listen only so they can speak.
Nelson Mandela and I have at least one thing in common – a startling beginning to a sentence- we both survived by being humbled. It was one of his most famous quotes, in fact, “I survived by becoming humble.”
Me too. Humility was not something I chose, I got it by having my face pressed into the mud.
Falling apart on my mountain was humbling, humility took my ego and arrogance and squeezed like a Graham cracker, crumbling it to bits. I am a follower of Beavis & Butthead. Because I am stupid, I am free. Because I fled college, I never learned what I was supposed to think, so I can think.
The first words I said to a shrink I finally got to was “I don’t know what happened to me.” Good, she said, that means you can learn what happened to you.
I am writing a lot today because I have been opened up this week.
Our friend Mary Kellogg the poet fell and broke her hip, and her 88 years of life changed instantly. She is now living in an adult home and not on her beloved farm. She hopes to get back there. Our friend Ed Gulley the farmer has an inoperable number of brain tumors. He has refused further treatment.
Someone I trusted hurt me in a particularly vulnerable way. My dog died.The larger-than-life people are not larger than life, they are life itself.
I respect life, and I am coming face-to-face with a lot of it. This is a testing time, a growing time, a learning time. I have never felt stronger, or clearer, or more humbled.
This morning, a message from Ed’s wife Carol that he wanted to see me today. It wasn’t urgent, he wanted to talk. I said no, I had to work today, i couldn’t come. it felt bad, then good. This was important, I have to keep myself, those are the boundaries of love. I can come tomorrow, if wanted.
Beyond that, I am sad at the anger and cruelty that seems to be spreading like some awful virus through the very air. I do not despair, I see great light ahead. I have great hope, there is a new beginning just around the corner. I am waiting for it, there is a great awakening.
This too, is humbling in many ways. It feels like a conflict between divinity and humanity is tearing me and taking place inside of me, pulling me apart inside, and pulling my world apart outside.
I think I spent much of my life crying outward for someone to fulfill my needs and console me. No one could or no one did.
I felt that way over the weekend. But I have learned instead to cry inward, to the place where I can let myself be held and carried by my own idea of God, the inner spirit that is the center of me, my soul.
That is the incarnation of my own sense of empathy and humanity, my own community which is with me always, the place I have learned to go when I am hurting. That does help, it does heal.
And beyond my own anguish, there are human hands that will hold me and show me faithful love. I respect life, I do not deny it’s choices.
I am comforted again and again by a very simple but somehow liberating realization: I don’t know. I don’t need to know. I am crying inward, tears of the heart.
The Mansion has posted a new and short and inexpensive Wish List on Amazon, – Beads, Badges, Plastic Recycling Bins, Finding Dory, and Shrek. Videos of this new movies will brighten some afternoons and evenings at the Mansion. Your wish list gifts are arriving steadily now, they are a rich addition to life there.
In assisted care, the days can sometimes drag by, good movies and real craft tools are a stimulation, gathering of community and just fun. Thanks so much for supporting the new Amazon Mansion Wish List. You’ve already turned it over twice, this one won’t last long. The Army Of Good, is well, good.
If you wish to support my work at the Mansion, you can send your contributions to The Gus Fund, c/o Jon Katz. P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816, or via Paypal, [email protected]
Here is a list of Mansion residents who wish to receive your letters, photos, gifts and messages: Winnie, Jean, Ellen,Mary, Gerry, Sylvie, Diane, Alice, Jean, Madeline, Joan, Allan, Bill, Helen, Bob, Alanna, Peggie, Dot, Tim, Ben, Art, Guerda, Brenda, Wayne, Kenneth, Ruth.
At 4:50 p.m., the gofundme project for Carol and Ed Gulley was $11,945, already nearly $2,000 over the goal of $1,000. And we can keep going, hopefully all the way to $50,000. The original goal was $10,000 but that was passed Sunday. I want you to know that the money is not for toys, or for some fun.
This afternoon, the goal was raised to $25,000, that is good news. I believe Ed and Carol will need at least $50,000 to do what they want and need to do, and so I am going to keep pushing for that amount.
Ed has a cancerous series of tumors in his brain, it is an aggressive tumor and inoperable. He has refused chemotherapy or exploratory surgeries. He would love to go to Montana with his wife Carol, but they will also have many serious medical and other needs. Whatever happens down the road, Ed is sure to need extensive medical care and support.
I know the Gulleys well, and they are hard-working farmers who have spent their loves outdoors, fixing tractors, pulling calves out of cows, milking and loving animals. They are good people for whom our society does not any longer provide much support when the bottom falls out.
The farmers like to talk about their bucket lists, and some people like to talk about the gofundme project as money for such a list.
A bucket list gives a person a purpose in life. It’s something you know you want to do. It gives you goals to reach for, something to get out of life. Ed does not know how much life he has left to get out of. He could find a miraculous cure, he could not. No one can say.
And there is so much he needs to do – care for himself, support his children, who are taking over the farm, get his house fixed up and ready for Carol if he does not recover or can’t do the work himself. His “bucket list” is about a lot more than a trip to Montana.
Farmers have fed us well all of our lives, we are the best fed people on the earth, but we are not grateful, our bellies are too full. Milk prices are the same as they were in 1970. Ed is an iconic farmer, one of the last of a dying breed.
He has not gone corporate, but kept his family farm small enough to feed his family, and small enough to know each cow by name, and love his animals as he loves his children. He says his cows are his best friend.
I think of Ed when I read Wendell Berry, a famous writer, environmentalist, poet and chronicler of the farm.
” A competent farmer,” he writes, “is his own boss. He has learned the disciplines necessary to go ahead on his own, as required by economic obligation, loyalty to his place, pride in his work. His workdays require the use of long experience and practiced judgment, for the failures of which he knows that he will suffer. His days to not begin and end by rule, but in response to necessity, interest, and obligation. They are not measured by the clock, but by the task and his endurance; they last as long as necessary or as long as he can work, and his endurance. He has mastered intricate formal patterns in ordering his work within the overlapping cycles – human and natural, controllable and uncontrollable – of the life of a farm.”
Ed is a more than competent farmer. For decades, along with his wife Carol, taken care of his four children, his cows, his farm, his land. I believe he is deserving of our support.
As he fights for his life, the welfare of his family, the future of his farm, and his own remaining goals in life, I hope we can continue to support him and move towards $50,000, which is what I believe he will need. He has some tractors to repair and replace, some insulation to install, some roofing work to finish.
Farmers and others are rushing to his side, people from all over, doing all kinds of work.
And yes, he means to get to Montana with his wife to see the beautiful mountains he has always dreampt about. You can contribute to the fund here.
Lord, do I hate the Left and the Right, and what they both are doing to my country and my mind, and the way in which they pollute and corrupt the very air we breathe. A pox on them, may the cherubs swoop down from heaven and sting all their cheeks.
I really hate very few things in the world these days, a monumental and welcome evolution for me.
I’m with Dr. King, I’ve decided to stick to love, hate is just too great a burden to bear, and I’m no good at it. It does seem I am quite out of sync with much of my country and many of my readers.
But I do truly hate the Left and the Right and I hope they devour one another completely, as many are beginning to do.
Yesterday, I wrote a letter to people who think differently from me, expressing my sorrow at the attacks on Sarah Huckabee Sanders the other night, and exploring my idea of walking more gently and softly in the world. I wanted to tell them they are welcome to read my blog, it is not important to me to be agreed with (blessedly). I have always learned more from people who disagree with me than from anyone.
I’ve learned this year that trying to do good is quite selfish. It feels so much better than hatred or anger and the perpetual argument and dogma that passes for conversation online, on TV and all over Washington. Such a simple idea, walking gently, and so elusive.
Unlike any other animal on the earth, something about the human loves to hate. I see I’m writing some sappy stuff lately, only the canned and mindless rhetoric of the Left and the Right could get me to do that, I think they are breaking me down.
I was inspired to write the piece by the controversy over comedian Michelle Wolf’s very personal riff on Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House Press Secretary at the White House Correspondent’s dinner. I found the skit unnecessarily cruel and harsh. I like Wolf and her biting comedy, it usually is funny. But the other night, it just seemed mean to me.
It made me uncomfortable, which satire and comedy sometimes does, and sometimes should do. It totally obscured the notion of a free and independent press, which was allegedly the point of the whole night.
For me, it just went too far, especially with the invited target just a few feet away and with no place to run or hide.
I won’t be coy, I didn’t expect my somewhat woo-woo post would end the deepening polarization and argument in our world, but I thought it might at least get someone to think or talk about being gentler. I’m getting soft in the head, worn down by yelling and self-righteousness. My post was a kind of gentle lament about the endless controversies engulfing our country, the idea that there are only two ways to look at the world, it is rubbing our sensibilities raw and separating us from one another.
And so I needed to say I was sorry about it, a narcissistic impulse, I suppose. I wanted people who think differently to stay around me, they are precious.
But I mean, who cares what I think about it all? Even the dogs yawn when I write sometimes.
But you know what? People do care, although not necessarily in the ways I might like.
I was quickly disabused by my sappy musing, my Thomas Merton’ish (you, sir, are no Thomas Merton, and he would not have lasted an hour on Facebook) rumination by the first post on Facebook, it was from Nancy, a warrior of the Left, she was having none of it. She loved the comedy skit, every word.
“You don’t get to clutch your pearls with one hand, and enable a pussy-grabbing, neo-Nazi apologizing, money-launderer for the Russian mob with the other.”
Well, so much for soft talking.
I liked the writing, but given her tone and sweep, it got my back up a bit. I am no Dalai Lama.
I said I couldn’t really tell the difference from the endlessly vicious tweets coming out of the White House and Nancy’s description of Trumpism. “He had it coming, so let’s get her,” didn’t quite work as an argument for me, it reminded me of Middle School, which I really hated.
To me, Nancy’s comment was the very expression of elitism, an assumption of moral superiority, an indirect but very clear swipe at more than half of the country, which includes many of my friends and neighbors.
I live in Trump Land. I remember all those Trump signs sprouting up like dandelions.
I do not exactly accurately reflect the politics of my town, but the people I know here are not Nazi’s or money launderers, or sexual predators or bigots. Almost all of them voted for Donald Trump. I have learned a lot from listening to them this year rather than calling them names.
As I have come to know them, they are good and hard-working and law-abiding people who feel angry and left behind and are struggling all the time to stay afloat. They make me feel welcome her, carry things to my car, open doors for me, invite me to dinner, grumble about the weather. They want this too old trap they are in to change, for them and their children.
This week, all of the restaurants in my town are empty because it’s a bit colder than usual at this time of year, and people have had to go out and buy one more cord of firewood and order another tankful of heating oil and propane.
Every waitress in town knows that there is nothing left over for a hamburger with the kids on Friday night. One more cord of wood, one more tank of oil makes a big difference here.
I told Nancy we didn’t do The Nasty on my web and Facebook pages and blog, that was sort of the point of my piece, I told her to take it elsewhere. She was, of course, outraged and indignant said she was going elsewhere and never returning. She said she was a loyal and long-time reader of mine. I guess not.
She was clearly not into the mushy stuff I was writing, she wanted to stick her fork right in somebody’s thieving, Nazi, money-laundering neck. Look how much good that has done for us, I thought.
I said she was always welcome to come back, just not to be nasty. She will not come back.
Then another woman complained that I was undermining my own argument, “attacking” a stranger on Facebook. I had no right to disagree with someone jeering at my own ideas.
Then the shock troops, the very vigilant guardians of the Left and the Right arrived – they must have the ability to send secret signals to one another – my naive and woo wood lament was quickly engulfed in the canned Left/Right arguments and cant that now consume any public discussion about any subject anywhere in America.
So there were all these digital squabbles breaking out on my Facebook Page, like a tailgate party after a football game, the very things I was saying I hope to get away from and had never been a part of, he-said, she-said, but they did it, so we can do it, and nyaaaah, nyaaaah, and blah-blah-blah. Is it just me, or this loud noise which says nothing bothering anybody else? And here, I invited it right into my digital home.
I welcome you into my small world where we might be able to start a new tradition of listening and civility which might become a meme, a digital virus that spreads across the Internet. It could happen. Look what Thomas Paine did with a pamphlet.
Think of the irony of it, my pathetic little argument for being softer draws all kinds of hard responses, suddenly there’s hate like flies on honey all over my Facebook page.
Here’s where we are: not being cruel is now controversial, we can’t agree on it.
Because Donald Trump composes hateful tweets, it is now acceptable to be as cruel and angry as we want, one bad turn deserves another. It doesn’t take Einstein to figure out where this ultimately must end. Just look at Congress, all locked together in their deadly dance. They even go after the Pastor for Pastoring.
I told Nancy I really couldn’t tell the difference between her words and those uttered by our Tweety BIrd President, whom, I should say in the interest of openness, that, I don’t much care for.
So I hate the Left and the Right, in part for making me hate the Left and the Right.
These two narrow and failed labels and ideologies are a scourge upon the earth, a way for people to not think and stop listening or talking to one another.
I hope to be struck down by lightning if I ever put a label on myself announcing to the world that I no longer have to think, only react.
I am often unsuccessful and foolish, but I never quit and do not unravel. I’ve seen a lot in my lengthening life, I have the skin of a Tyrannosaurus.
I am sorry to read and see such cruelty as I saw the other night, I hope I can keep my pledge to walk softly and gently on the earth. I’m heading the other way than Nancy.
Nancy, wherever you are, my blog will be a sore test of your values, and perhaps you are wise for getting away from it. I’m sorry about that too.
