Some day, I have to find a way to meet you people, hardly any of whom I know, but who seem so intuitive and connected to what I am trying to do that it is sometimes frightening as well as wonderful. Last week, I wrote on the blog that we needed some help with bingo prizes at the Mansion, we were running out of places to get enough good ones.
I went to the Mansion today and was led to the new Bingo Prize cart, overflowing with creative, inventive, needed, charming and necessary prizes, from bracelets that light up to classy rolled up underwear to stuffed animals, sugar free candy, cards, special pens, funky socks, sugar free candles, puzzles.
I just put up one piece, one post, one time. I didn’t know if anyone saw it.
And this full cart today was just the first day. There are a half-dozen big boxes waiting to be opened. More on the way. They are much appreciated, wonderful and there is already tremendous buzzing and excitement about the next Bingo Game, which will be called by me and Maria.
It was almost as if many of you were waiting for this request, and had imaginative hand made and other novelty crafts sitting by the back door waiting to be shipped out.
The purchased gifts are inventive and surprising. We seem so in sync with one another, how is this possible in this cynical and divided world? These gifts are perfect, right from the heart, just what the residents need and love and want.
It was bewildering, I told Julie, the very excited and grateful Mansion Activities Director. “DIdn’t I just put this up? How is this possible?” She just laughed and said I ought to know these people by now, they never fail me, they never fail the Mansion residents, they never fail themselves.
It was also exhilarating. There are so many good people out there, aching for the chance to do good.
When I mention something like the Bingo Prizes, I have no way of knowing if anyone will respond to what I write.
The Army Of Good is a humble entity, people do not need or demand thanks or stroking. The Mansion residents keep asking me who you are and I have no idea what to tell them. Good people out there somewhere, I say.
I never know until I walk into the Mansion or someone calls up to tell me the UPS or Fedex truck is backed up to the door and all kinds of boxes are stacking up in the hallway. Then I know.
You all somehow seem to grasp life in the Mansion, you are sending things I never would have thought of, but that the residents love. You seem to know how important a bingo game can be to people shut away from the world and at the edge of life. And how much it means to get to pick a special prize.
I wonder how to tell you how much you have meant to these people, once left behind and forgotten in so many cases. Today, when I left the Mansion, Sylvie was writing letters to so many of you. “Thank you, Jon,” she said, “thanks to you, I have so many friends now.”
I can’t thank you enough and more Bingo Prizes would be welcome. You can send them to Julie Harlin, Bingo Prizes, The Mansion, 11 S. Union Avenue, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816, Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Green grass in the Spring make sheep very happy. Next week, they get shorn, which will make them even happier. It’s no fun carrying that wool around in the summer.
In our culture, there is this powerful idea about crying outward, about crying out for people who we think can meet our needs, and soothe our fears, and comfort us in the difficult times that are so much a part of being human.
Men in particular are often ridiculed and prodded for their inability to show their emotions and talk about their feelings. The man who is broken outside but cannot get help is one of the great cliches about maleness in our world. We all know someone like that. It is said that men or women like that are not in touch with their feelings. Perhaps, I wonder, if they are crying inward.
There is, this idea, I think that crying outward is healthy and necessary to be whole.
There is also a widespread spiritual belief that there is a great split between divinity and humanity.
Human needs for affection, attention, and consolation are seen as something separate from spirituality or worship.
We go to church for one, therapists for another. We are told again and again to cry out for help if we need it, and one of the turning points of my life was to see that I needed help and then went and got some. Help helps.
In my own life, I have rarely, if ever, been able to cry outward. I cry inward, and that is a natural and healing place for me. When young, I was taught to fear the showing of too much emotion, and I still fear it. But I am not afraid to cry inward, and that, I find, is where my humanity lives, where my heart is.
Crying inward is personal and portable. When I am watching dishes at night, alone at the sink, I cry inward. When I am meditating, I often cry inward. When I am sitting outside in a chair, or lying awake at night, I often cry inward.
Does it really matter, I wonder, whether I cry outwardly or inwardly, as long as I can do it when I need to do it? Is the depth of the experience any less because I don’t choose to share it?
No one person can fulfill all of my needs. So I have come to look inside of me for help, and that is where I have always found it. My heart and soul have never failed me, misunderstood me, rejected me, misunderstood me, or hurt me. My community lives inside of me.
The community there can truly hold me and sustain me, beyond my anguish and fear and the great ability of human beings to hurt me.
Living in the country, i have come to have a different view of politics than I had when I lived in the city, and knew almost no one with a different point of view than I had. Here, my friends and neighbors almost all have a different view of the world than I have.
I look beyond my farm and out into our big country sometimes, and I ask myself one of life’s most important questions: Is the cup half full or half empty? Sometimes I think we are all divided into two ways of thinking. There are half full people, and half empty people. You know who I am talking about.
Many of my friends and neighbors voted differently than I did in 2016 or than I will later this year. We do not so far hate one another or argue much, we do talk every now and then, usually in gentle conversations, in gas station lines, on street corners, outside of the Post Office, we probe one another to see how things are changing, who is feeling what.
I think I keep waiting for them to get closer to me in their thinking, and they keep waiting for me to get closer to them.
None of us really like all of this fighting, we avoid it. None of us like the screamers and haters.
In some ways, we are all getting tired of perpetual crises and anger and judgement. The left and the right is a big headache for all of us, I think, a block to thinking or listening.
We don’t live in the world we see on TV, we live in the real world, we are all people, trying to get by, keeping an eye on the price of gas, fussing over health care, rolling our eyes at the failure of politicians.
We are also learning all the time from one another, and from the news. The raging arguments of the cable news channels and political problems are not what is happening here. We are neighbors, part of a community. We still come together every day to make decisions, hire a new police chief, fuss about taxes, worry about bleeding businesses on Main Street, worry about the farmers and the price of milk.
We actually get to listen to each other. Unlike the cable news commentators, we have no choice. And it is the nature of people, close-up to one another.
Yesterday, I had a talk with a friend and neighbor about the refugees and immigrants, he follows my blog sometimes, and he believes it is nice that the Army Of Good is helping people. But he does not believe the people I am helping belong in America, or that troubled and needy people from poor countries ought to be here.
His kids are among the needy people, he says, and no one is helping them. One died from the opioid catastrophe, another can’t find a job here. His father, who lost his factory job decades ago, died of drink and despair. Nobody raised a nickel for them.
He and his father and grandfather watched all the good jobs leave for generations, seen the towns dry up and the farms close. They feel that they are losing their country. And that they finally have a President who listens to them.
My friend an I are not intimate buddies, we don’t have dinner at one another’s house, it is really street corner kind of friendship, but I think it is important to both of us. He still reads my blog, listens to me, talks to me, and we are still glad to see one another. We just accept the spaces between us, we don’t argue about them.
He is a good friend, a good man. We know we might need one another some day. Community is important. I tell him the stories of the refugees, he listens carefully, I am not sure what he is thinking.
Yesterday, we had a short talk about moral utility. I told him I was reading Jon Meacham’s book, “The Soul Of America,” about the moral underpinning of our Republic, and also about how the vastly different struggles about morality and justice are not new to America, they are quite old. Meacham is a respected historian, he doesn’t write from the left or the right, but from history and facts.
The struggles we are going through now in America are not only old, but are also uplifting in many ways, he says, because they tell us that moral considerations are important, and changing, or there wouldn’t be so many ferocious struggles about them.
The cup is half full, he writes. Without struggle, there is no progress, there is no freedom and tolerance and compassion. Struggle means we are moving towards a moral reckoning.
In the main, said Meacham, the America of the twenty-first century is, for all of its problems, freer and more accepting than it has ever been. If that weren’t the case, the largely right-wing attacks on immigrants and the widening mainstream wouldn’t be so angry, even ferocious. I told this to my friend, and I had the sense this struck him as true. I’m not sure.
An enduring and sometimes tragic element of our country, writes Meacham, is that every advance triggers a response from the elements of reaction, who are not new but have always been a visible part of our history. And often, much more aggressively than now.
In the years after Lincoln’s death the America that shed so much blood to free the slaves endured Reconstruction, a regressive century of persecution and suppression of the newly emancipated. It is still not quite over, as almost any African-American will testify.
It’s always about the other – blacks, transgender people, women, refugees, immigrants, “criminals.” We always dread the other, but there are always more others to come. It has never been over, it will never be over. It just gets worse sometimes, and it just gets better sometimes.
Which brings us to what Meacham calls the “moral utility of history.” It is tempting, he writes, to feel superior to the past. When I think of all of the people who view the world differently than I do, many of them with great power, I am reminded that righteousness is easy, and also cheap. What injustices, Meacham wonders, are we perpetrating now that will be judged harshly in the future?
When I think of politics these days, I get personal. How can I contribute?
How can I be hopeful and thoughtful? How can I listen? What can I learn?
History is a balm for me, I see over and over again that we have been through much harder times than this. The more I read about Harry Truman, the more I admire his decency, directness and common sense. The presidency, writes historian Meacham, offers great possibilities for actions that are both dazzling and daunting.
The president, wrote Woodrow Wilson “is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can.” JFK said that people can be as big as they want.
Or as small.
As my friend and I continue to engage in this soft and glancing – and infrequent – dialogue – we are very careful not to offend or dismiss each other. I told him yesterday that I think about the possibilities for me in all of this to be a better man.
“I know we disagree about the refugees,” I told him,” and I see where you are coming from. My family found opportunity in America over these last generations. Your family lost opportunity. You want to get back what you lost.”
But, I said, I want to be as big a man as I can.
I want to be as big as I want. It feels small to me to make people suffer, or to watch them suffer in silence. “When I feel small, I know something is wrong for me.”
We were standing outside of a convenience store as we talked, and he nodded and said there was a lot to think about in our country now. He said he would go and buy the Meacham book and see what he had to say. I said he needn’t bother, I would drop it off at his house.
We shook hands and said goodbye.
I know it isn’t just people like my friend who see the world differently. It is also the people who agree with me.
The thing is, I just want to be as big as I can be. I think the cup is half full.
