All It Takes Is A Little Love

I try to take a break from politics now and then, but living in a buzz saw of political chaos makes it difficult to ignore the ugliness that is taking place in the name of justice. I fully realize that there are well meaning folks who demand that our laws and the way we enforce them be utterly fair. The trouble is that sometimes what may appear to be fair is actually cruel and dehumanizing. 

My mother often spoke of her childhood during the great depression. She never had an article of clothing or a pair of shoes that were not a well worn hand me downs. Being the youngest of eight children insured that she would require cardboard in the bottom of her shoes to close the gaping holes in the soles. It was not until she was able to get odd jobs and learn how to sew that she wore dresses with vibrant fabric. Nonetheless she felt grateful that she slept in a warm bed under a roof that her family owned. She may of have been thin from the meager portions of food that her mother served each day but she never missed a meal. All in all she understood that there were many souls during that time who were literally starving while she was fed. 

Perhaps because of my mother’s memories of those difficult time, or maybe because of the example of my grandmother, my mama was always generous and nonjudgmental toward people who were struggling for one reason or another. She told me that homeless people would knock on the back door of her childhood home seeking any kind of food or drink that my grandmother was willing to share. She was quite proud that Grandma never once turned anyone down and that she treated the folks who came by with great respect. Often she was only able to offer a piece and bread and some coffee but those who experienced her largess would sometimes weep in thankfulness. 

As fate would have it my mother became a widow at the age of thirty and would live on the edge of the economic spectrum for much of her life. Things got particularly difficult when her mental illness flared up. Somehow she managed not only to keep a roof over her head but also food in her pantry. She had learned how it was done from her always frugal parents. All the while she was also as generous as her mother, had been never missing an opportunity to help anyone who was less fortunate than she was.

Many might hear my mother’s story and think that it is proof that you don’t need to give a hungry or homeless person a fish when a fishing pole might be just as good. My mother would have disagreed with this idea because she truly understood that there are times when some people have neither the health nor the bait to go fishing. She never hesitated to provide the sustenance that they needed in the moment. 

We have homelessness problems all over the world. Sometimes it seems odd, however, to see people living on the streets in the richest country in the world. The United States should be able to deal with such situations but so far we have not been particularly effective. We know that many of those people are alcoholics, drug addicts or mentally ill. We would like to lecture them on pulling themselves together but surely we know that sometimes they need a bit more help than advice. Each of those reasons for being without work and a home are very complex and most people are unable to simply will themselves back into being productive citizens. Without a great deal of patience and support they are unlikely to suddenly become well. I’ve heard of efforts that move in the right direction but there are too few of them to tackle the problem and not enough funding to increase them.

The best methods begin with providing the individuals with a safe place to live and the medical care needed to get well again. All of these things have to be offered with kindness and without judgement. There has to be enough time and patience put into the efforts to allow for mistakes to be made but with enough love most people will ultimately respond even if it does not work for a hundred percent of the people. Sometimes the minds of the chronically homeless are just too far gone but even at that any progress in getting people back to a healthy state is a good thing. 

The next effort has to be aimed at training them for work that will provide them with enough income to support themselves along with safety nets to protect them as they attempt to resurface into the world. This again takes time but programs that have been dedicated to this kind of methodology have performed miracles. Every life saved should be more than worth the time and money needed to do so. 

I suppose that I sound like an idealist in a real world that is often cruel. There will be those who insist that only toughness will work. They want to round up homeless people and clean the streets. They want these souls sent to detention centers to keep them from wandering away again. They recommend their method as a way of protecting hard working citizens from the rot and dangers of homeless encampments. They do not see these people as redeemable or worth the expenditures or attempts to make them better. 

I may be wrong, but I would much prefer that we devote ourselves to a nationwide campaign to help as many of these lost souls as possible. Every life saved is one more reason that we at least need to try. Without my brothers and I watching over our mother she might have wandered away one day in a state of mania and ended up alone on the streets. She had a family that believed in her. We need to be that family for those who do not have anyone. We have what we need if only we also show the willingness to share. 

The best people that I have ever known carried a great burden of compassion and concern on their shoulders and in their hearts. They were and are people who cannot ignore unfairness or unkindness. They are protectors who seem to take on the weight of the world’s problems. Theirs is often a difficult state of mind just like the empath on Star Trek who almost died from bearing the anxieties and pains of those around her. 

My mother was like that. She was highly perceptive and seemed to know when someone was suffering even when they had not mentioned what was bothering them to anyone. She would fret over their situations even in times when there was very little that she might do to actually help them. Somehow people understood that they might bare their souls to Mama. They knew that they would be safe from ridicule or judgement with her. 

I remember so many times when ladies came to visit my mother and there would be hushed conversations happening in our living room. Sometimes I would catch a glimpse of a person crying in my mother’s arms. She never spoke of what had happened or what had been said. Secrets were secret with her. She honored people and their privacy. 

I don’t know if my mother only listened or if she offered advice. She was actually quite wise although I never realized the full extent of her understanding nature until she had died. When she was gone I missed her willingness to drop everything to hear what was worrying me or anyone else. She had good ideas but only suggested them if asked for help. Most of the time I just emoted with her, left her with more worries to cart around in her beautiful heart. It never occurred to me how many burdens I left her to think about. I was always able to simply move on, after all tomorrow was another day. For Mama the stories and pleas and anxious moments that came from those of us who knew that she could be trusted with our hopes and dreams and fears never left her mind. They accumulated until she would sometimes break like a fragile glass figurine. 

I was good at tidying things up. I would get my mother well again and move on little understanding that her thoughts were never far from me, sometimes haunting her in the middle of the night. She was totally devoted to me and my brothers. She gave us her life and her love without any conditions. She thought that we were incredibly wonderful no matter how we might have slighted or hurt her. She only admitted to her pain whenever we treated her mental illness as being easier to handle that it actually ever was for her. 

My mother wanted desperately to be whole again, to be well enough to forego the pils and the visits to doctors. She had been so strong until she wasn’t and her dream was to regain that level of health once again. She would fight her mental illness rather than be resigned to it. She tried so hard to just gut it out. She wanted her strong will to chase away the darkness of her depression and the demons of her mania. 

I would get frustrated with my mother. There were times when I became angry as though she had somehow wished to be mentally ill and had ruined my own serenity on purpose. Of course I knew better but our journey through forty years of ups and downs was bound to make us both say and do things that we would later regret. It is the nature of such situations.

I have thought about my mother almost every single day since she died fourteen years ago. I have wanted to go back and apologize to her for losing my patience, I would give anything to have an opportunity to tell her what an incredible mother she was and how I appreciate all of the sacrifices and love that she gave me. I rely on the religious idea that she has been rewarded for her goodness in heaven and that she indeed knows how much esteem I have for her. In retrospect I see how brave and determined she was to be healthy and normal again. I see how disappointed she must have felt when the depression descended on her again and then the mania made her a caricature of herself.

People like my mother who personalize the pain of the world in their souls are the true angels on this earth. It is easy to just look away from the suffering of others but my mother was never able to be so detached. She was the best person I have ever known.

In the novel The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald writes, “They were careless people–Tom and Daisy–they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Of late it feels as though very wealthy Americans who have no concept of what it is like to be ordinary are behaving like Tom and Daisy. The combined income of Trump’s cabinet is estimated to be well over twenty billion dollars. Not a one of them lives a middle class lifestyle. They jet around with their designer clothes and watches, staying in the finest hotels and eating the finest food. They lost touch long ago with being just one of the unknown and unheard faces in the world and yet they act as though they know exactly what we all need to enjoy better lives. Unfortunately their ideas are doing little more that tearing our agencies and our laws apart. Their smashing of things is making our existence all the more difficult. 

I have read every page of Project 2025 and it outlines much of what these rich folks are doing in the name of giving our democracy a major redux. Their idea of saving money is to take away much of ours while enriching themselves at every turn. They think of themselves as being brighter than most of us and their biggest hope is that we won’t take notice of what they are doing until it is way too late to clean up the horrendous messes they have made. 

I’ve been watching them in a state of anxiety as I see them hacking at our educational foundations, our public schools and our world class universities. They act as though they know everything there is to understand about how to run such complex organizations but they are way out of their element. A school or university is not just a business whose goal is to garner money. The investment in education leads to a citizenry capable of running and improving virtually every aspect of American life. The investments in education reap far more important gains in the end than just slashing budgets without much thought as to the unintended consequences of doing so. 

As a matter of fact a large number of unintended consequences are beginning to emerge from so many aspect of our government. Right now our once stunning health and medical organizations are reeling under the guidance of a man who is untrained in either medicine or science who does not believe in germ theory. He is peddling hoaxes and untested theories as though they are true and firing reputable experts who dare to question his ideas. it would be as though I suddenly landed a job as a college football coach just because I’ve watched a lot of games and read articles about how to pull a team together. 

Then there is the travesty of our immigration system which is now represented by barely trained masked members of ICE who seem to be picking up anyone who appears to be remotely suspicious. They show up decked out in camo with little or no identification bearing guns that should only be given to soldiers engaged in actual war. Their great leader has so many costumes that she will surely inspire many looks for Halloween. 

Our military is being run by a television personality who seems to think that dressing like Uncle Sam makes him more patriotic. He wants to call the Defense Department the Department of War even in supposed times of peace. It blows me away that members of the military are not protesting loudly and clearly for surely he is making our nation less safe than it once was.

Those tariffs that we are urged to love are already raising the prices of everything. My husband looked at a jacket that was one hundred dollars earlier this summer that is now one hundred twenty five dollars. Because it was made in South Korea I suspect that the price might rise even higher once the official tariffs kick in. For some reason fools seem to think that this is good for our nation but already India has decided to shift its commercial efforts from the United States to China and Russia. 

Speaking of Russia, Trump’s kowtowing of Putin has not gotten him anywhere. It feels as though Putin is just gleefully giving us the finger even as we roll out the red carpet for him. If someone had told me back in the sixties during the Cuban Missile Crisis that one day our president would be attempting to cozy up to a Russian dictator I would not have believed it. Actually I would not have believed that the son of Robert F. Kennedy Sr. would be such an embarrassment to his family either. 

I loved reading The Great Gatsby with its symbols, metaphors and allusions to the struggles between the very wealthy and the rest of us. Never did I think that our nation would fall for fakers whose only goal in life is to accumulate more and more power but now such people seem to be in charge of everything. I hope our destiny is not to end up like Jay Gatsby. Surely we won’t let these clueless folks continue to corrupt our American Dreams. It’s time we see and deal with the moral decay. 

If my father had lived he would be one hundred two today. It would not have been an unusual occurrence given that his father was one hundred eight years old when he died. Longevity seems to have been common in Daddy’s family. Sadly his life was cut short by a car accident that would mostly likely not resulted in his death in today’s world of automobile safety that includes seatbelts, air bags, and steering wheels designed to collapse in a collision. Anyone of those things would have saved my father from having his chest crushed thus stopping his heart at the age of thirty three. 

I loved my father but only knew him as a child. I have often wondered how our relationship would have evolved as I grew into an adult. I suspect that I would have continued to enjoy the love of music and books that he had already planted in me. I can imagine having interesting discussions with him and traveling to many places together. Still, I wonder how different things would be. 

There came a time when I was no longer able to recall how my father’s voice sounded. He died before we had a movie camera that recorded both movement and sound. He was a silent image to me even though I remembered his liveliness and his love of laughter. One of my aunts told me that if I ever wanted to hear his voice I need only listen to my youngest brother who also happens to be a physical clone of Daddy. I have take great comfort in knowing that and it is not surprising at all to me that my little brother is a great storyteller and comic just like our father. Genes will have their way in each of us. 

Two of my brother’s sons visibly resemble my father as well. In fact, not long ago, I looked across the room at one of my nephews and was startled for a moment because he looked so much like the man who would have been his grandfather. The other nephew shares the same kind of features and through him I have come to believe that I know how my father appeared as a child even though there are no photos of him before he was in junior high. 

One of my grandsons shares an uncanny resemblance to my father in both appearance and personality as well. He and I joke that we got my father’s hair which was already beginning to thin and recede at the age of thirty three. We’ve got his cheekbones as well. My grandson even attended Texas A&M University like my father and majored in Mechanical Engineering as well. It is uncanny how much alike they are.

I sometimes find myself imagining how much my daughters and grandchildren would have loved him. He was a sweet, thoughtful and entertaining person who loved to chat with boyhood friends as well as coworkers and neighbors. He seemed to attract people wherever he went because he was genuinely interested in them. He was a kind of Renaissance Man who was an artist, a poet, an architect, an engineer, a fisherman, a collector of books of every topic, an historian, a most interesting and loyal man.

My mother’s doctors told me that she would have probably been quirky rather than dangerously debilitated by her bipolar disorder had my father lived. The stresses of raising me and my brothers alone ultimately overcame her. My father had a way of helping her to feel safe even when her illness sometimes manifested in silly arguments that Daddy knew how to tamp down. She fell apart when he died and as a child I wondered if she would ever be the same. Somehow she pulled herself together, but the stress ultimately overtook her ability to cope without medical intervention. 

I know that it is silly to pine forever, so I learned how to move forward. I do not dwell on my father and the might have beens. I’ve had too much to do to loll in sorrow. I understand that it is unlikely that I would be the same person that I now am even with a few tiny changes in the direction of my life. If he had lived I would be a slightly different person. I would have gone to different schools and interacted with different people. Each tiny redirection would have impacted me, but my father’s early influence on me was already imprinted on my soul and had much to do with the choices I made and the joy that I found after he was gone. 

Each time September 2 rolls around I feel the need to honor Jack Little. He was a very good, loving, generous man who taught me so much more than he may have thought he had done. His influence loomed large on the person I ultimately became and I think of him and feel grateful to him in spite of the long absence that became the reality of my relationship with him. I know his faults but they were small in comparison with the talents and morality that he shared with the world during the brief time that he was alive. Perhaps it was his mother who best captured the essence of who he was when her eyes would fill with tears and she would proclaim to me, “Your Daddy was always a very good boy, a wonderful son and father.”

Happy Birthday, Daddy!

Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” And he said, “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?” Genesis

The phrase, Am I my brother’s keeper, is part of a well known story in the biblical tradition of Christianity. Cain had just murdered his brother Abel when God confronted him. Cain’s flippant response was an attempt to shrug off responsibility for the welfare of his sibling. In doing so his attitude came to be equated with many of the most immoral human tendencies. He was not only a murderer but one who seemed to believe that he was entitled to independence from the problems of others. His was an “every man for himself” way of thinking that has continued in some circles throughout the long history of humankind. 

A question that we all face at one time or another is how much time and effort should we provide for the welfare of people beyond ourselves or our families? Why should we be concerned about whether or not people that we do not even know have the same sense of safety, security and freedom from want that we have? After all, nobody can be all things to all people, so why should we worry about individuals and groups that have nothing to do with us? Such are moral questions that have been the stuff of debates for centuries. 

Some insist that charity begins at home and that our real challenge should be pushing people to learn how to fend for themselves. While this might be a very noble way of thinking, it does not take into account the individual challenges that people may endure either for a lifetime or a moment. In every case we need to consider what has brought a person or an entire group to a tragic situation in which they struggle to pull themselves out of despair. 

We might see a homeless person and instantly make a judgement about why he is there. Some of our guesses might actually be true. He may be a drug addict or an alcoholic. He may be suffering from mental illness. He may be all of those things and much more. What we do not know is how the person became this way. The stories of people who live on the streets are incredibly complex and viewing them stereotypically will not solve the homeless problem nor will simply arresting them. It would be far better to feed them, clothe them, provide them with a safe place to stay, treat their medical needs and attempt to determine what has brought them to this state. 

The same can be said of immigrants who come to live among us. Do we not see them as people equal to us? Do we focus only on the fact that they came here without the proper papers? Do we deny them any kind of assistance and insist that they leave even if that means locking them up in prisons? Does being our brother’s keeper mean that we should first treat them with the dignity that each person deserves? Perhaps if we saw them as equal to ourselves we might view their situations with kinder eyes. We would begin to understand their desperation. It is a fact that few people would pick up and leave their homeland to travel to a place where they are all too often unwanted unless they felt that there was no other alternative. This has been the reasoning migrations of individuals and groups throughout history.

There are not doubt lazy people, criminals, individuals who seem unwilling to even try to fend for themselves or to do the right things. Sadly they have been among us for all time and knowing what to do with them can be a very tricky decision. Sometimes for our safety we have to incarcerate them, but once we have locked them up we don’t have to be cruel. We all know of people who did horrific things who eventually found peace in admitting their wrongs. There are good souls who work inside prisons doing the work of loving even the worst sinners. They bring hope and compassion to people who do not seem to deserve it and in the process they literally change lives. 

We play a balancing game in life. We have limited resources, limited time. Each of us can only do so much to be our brother’s keepers. We cannot allow someone who does foul things or someone unwilling to change to deplete our resources and our energy but we might certainly do better in our willingness to share our bounty and goodwill with those whose situations are brutal through no fault of their own. In such instances we have a moral obligation to do whatever we can to help even if that means voting for leaders who are compassionate rather than those who are stingy and cruel. 

There are so many voices crying out for our help right now. It seems incredibly wrong that we are allowing food to rot in warehouses, creating a force of masked thugs to grab people for little or no reason other than suspicion of being illegal. How can we sit by and watch a genocide unfolding in real time in places like Gaza? Why are we so reluctant to make healthcare available to everyone when ours is the wealthiest nation in the world? What good is a guilded White House or an unnecessary ballroom or a fancy plane? Our president should be a man of the people and for the people, not a power hungry individual who does not seem to understand his duty to be the keeper of even the souls who did not vote for him.

There are presently many efforts to make our nation a Christian nation which actually fly in the face of our concept of freedom of religion. They also call into question our willingness to be our brothers’ keepers as instructed in the Bible. We might start with examples of the true tenets of Christianity rather than forcing everyone to accept the ideals. If we want citizens to adopt a moral way of living we would do well to demonstrate our willingness to be compassionate with everyone. Jesus made it very clear that we are to love one another as we love ourselves. We need to work toward becoming that way. Our nation will rise by lifting others.