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A nation that grew to greatness from the efforts of the tempest-tossed and wretched refuse of teeming shores, that saved the world from fascism, and sent men to the moon by employing vision and powers of the mind is seeking a statesperson. This nation is seeking honorable men and women for leadership positions to restore a great country to decency. The nation is seeking an intelligent, insightful individual with no conflicts of interest who desires to do what is right even in the face of opposition or party loyalties, a person who can lead a revolution of thought and behavior. This person should be able to speak the truth with respect. No prisoners of political correctness or impulsivity should apply. Good candidates will allow their own ideas to be informed by other points of view. We are looking for someone who can acknowledge the truth about the past while leading us into the future. The ideal candidate will be of sound mind. Other important qualities include grace, dignity, restraint, compassion, and empathy. He or she will provide a conscience for capitalism--understanding that economic growth and prosperity do not have to come at the price of greed, deceit, corruption, or poor quality goods and services. We are looking for people with educated minds capable of seeing the big picture and the long term consequences of action. The statesperson should be able to speak in an articulate fashion providing clarity about views and positions without insulting others. Preferred applicants will be those who can get responsible gun owners to the table to discuss how to protect second amendment rights as well as the lives of school children, concert-goers, and church members. A worthy candidate is someone who can acknowledge the seismic changes in the culture that have left too many people feeling confused and angry without any idea about how the world works, how to find a job or get ahead--someone who understands that all the rules about living have been upended and can fill us with hope in this time of uncertainty, someone who can give people a future and a will to live. The right individual will be able to elevate good, working, productive people above celebrity. Applicants should have the strength to call out companies that collude to create epidemics and economic crashes and then benefit again by charging the public for the antidotes. The best candidates are those who live by example, obeying the laws of the land and rules of civility. We are not looking for great men and women. We are looking for good ones. We are seeking someone who can transform public opinion about government service and make it an honorable aspiration once again. Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of their country. Apply in person.
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I set out on the walking path as usual this morning. At the end of the path there is a large commercial property. Most days I pick up a few extra miles by circling the lot twice before reversing for home. Lately, I have encountered a maintenance worker there on my first pass around the lot. The maintenance worker is an older gentleman. His build is so slight that his baseball cap alone seems to overwhelm his small frame. He pushes a cart full of brooms and shovels, sprays and rags while pulling a vacuum cleaner behind him. This busy man is not much taller than the cart he maneuvers around this giant property. Most days I greet him with a smile and a simple hello. Some days I compliment him on the way he keeps the property looking so lovely. This morning as I came around a bend in the sidewalk I saw the maintenance worker taking a break at a picnic table inside a small pavilion. He turned to me and said, “There’s my little lady.” I laughed and said, “I think God intended for us to meet. I’m Lilli.” Smiling broadly, he extended his hand to me, “Jesse.” The encounter was pleasant and brief, but as I walked on I could not ignore the strength that came from his hand. Had we stood side-by-side, no one would have doubted that I was the sturdier one of this pair, and yet the strength there in his hand… And that feeling of strength remained upon my palm and at the base of my thumb for much of the day. Ironically, the right hand I offered to Jesse is a hand weakened from radiation following breast cancer treatment. It started with a fibrosis in my shoulder and the nerve pain inched its way down my arm into my hand. I first noticed the pain and the weakness as I struggled to lift a small pot of boiling water from the stove. But here, after this brief encounter, I felt a renewed if not unusual strength in my right hand. I know that it has become cliché to say that people and things are not always what they seem or that looks can be deceiving, but the strength in Jesse’s hand was a needed reminder for me. We make big judgments about people based on a glance, but most people have unseen strengths earned through hardship, work, and even the ordinary demands of daily living. I study my weakened hand and feel Jesse’s strength upon it, a strength that was given freely and generously in response to nothing more than a smile and a kind word or two, and I wonder: can it really be that easy? Share your strength with someone today. I am beginning to suspect that good hygiene has been my downfall, my kryptonite, the real reason I did not live an accomplished life outside my own four walls. It took retirement to shine the spotlight on what should have been obvious much earlier: I am a powerhouse in my pajamas but once I stop to take a shower and get dressed, I’m like Samson with a fresh haircut--my superpowers fall into the waste bin, gone in a snip. I can leap tall buildings (or at least a high mattress) with a single bound when I awaken in the morning. I fire up the computer and turn on the day. I make my bed. I straighten up my entire apartment and put away the dishes. I water the plants. I check the refrigerator for aged leftovers and wrap up the remains for the trash. I wipe down the bathroom sink and empty the trash can. I replace the toilet paper roll and put out a clean hand towel. I clean out my purse and check my change for valuable coins. I do my squats, lunges, pushups, wall squats, planks, and sit-to-stand exercises. I say my prayers. I pay my online bills and write cards to far away friends. I sort the laundry with actual care, checking the pockets for rogue Kleenex and gum wrappers carried home from use during my morning walks. I contemplate what else I can do with the day. And then it’s 8:30 AM, and I eat breakfast. I am completely comfortable and relaxed in my PJs. No tight waistband. No irritating fabric. No shoes Nothing to tug at me or to irritate my flesh or my nerves. No looking in the mirror to put the focus on how I look instead of what I can do. I am so happy in my pajamas that I am sure that if I actually encountered someone that I would be the kindest version of myself which gets me to thinking of soldiers sleeping all night in trenches waking in their combat fatigues ready for battle. Could my PJs be my compassion fatigues? Am I too old to save the world? I think back to my childhood when my younger sister was a preschooler. My mother would say “brush your hair” to which my sister would reply “Why? I’m not going anywhere.” Preschoolers have this down. No wonder they kick and scream when forced to dress. We lose something with age, but I am getting it back! The beauty of retirement is that I can spend all day in my PJs. I can answer the door at three o’clock in the afternoon dressed in my pajamas, sporting bedhead and morning breath and people will just shrug and say, “Old people.” With the general state of our couture, maybe we can get away with wearing our compassion fatigues in public. Comfortable old people changing the world! There is one minor but important exception: if you sleep in the nude, you might what to call that outfit your passion fatigues and do your work from home. Earlier this week I stepped out of my door onto the walking path. The sky was clear and brilliant blue in every direction save for a faint smudge that was the sleeping moon, God’s thumbprint on a new day. As I walked, somewhere in Utah the police stepped into a crime scene searching for evidence, a fingerprint perhaps. A young man, a boy really, had turned assassin. Where could he be? Why did he do it? Somewhere else, a grief stricken family stepped out onto the tarmac to receive the body of their son, husband, and father. He had left his handprint on their hearts. They will be devastated for a long time to come. Little was known about the shooter that morning. The victim was well known. Many people disagreed strongly with the victim’s rhetoric. Right or wrong in his point of view, killing him was wrong, and it did not make him a saint, but it did make him a martyr, silencing the opposition, elevating his words and beliefs, giving them even more attention and power. People who had never heard of him will now remember him forever. No one will remember the shooter’s name. He will be just another lost boy with a gun. I walked on thinking of all of them, all of us. We are all part of the same family. Every mother and father can imagine the grief of both sets of parents, both families. A mother myself, I ponder the question, “what is happening to our sons?” Why are they especially vulnerable to the hate proliferating in our society through our politics, social media, and video games? Why, increasingly, do polls show young men believe in violence as a solution to life’s problems? As an aging adult, I am exhausted by the hate and cruelty of some of our politicians and by the unchecked social media that generates continuous, unrelenting outrage to sell advertising. Perhaps a young person still gaining control of his impulses and the powers of his mind is unable to manage it, to shove it down, to find another outlet. In the growing isolation in which we live, the anger, outrage, and hatred grow unchecked inside him. Maybe the pain of being invisible just makes him want to be seen, to be remembered… I walked along that morning contemplating what has happened to our humanity. Fifty years ago a self-esteem movement began to gain momentum. Perhaps thinking of oneself has gone too far. We now live in an age of narcissism. Long past loving our neighbors as ourselves, we elected a man for president who once boasted that he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue in New York and get away with it, a man convicted of sexual assault and fraud, a man who has upended the entire world with his cruelty. Is this the new role model for young men? Alone on the path, I thought of the parable of the Good Samaritan, a story in which robbers strip, beat, and leave a Jewish man for dead alongside a road. A Jewish priest and a Levite cross the street to avoid the victim, to pass him by, but another traveler, a Samaritan is “moved with compassion” and stops to help even though Jews and Samaritans were known to be antagonistic toward one another. Perhaps the Jewish priest and the Levite who passed by the suffering victim thought only about themselves, their fears, their reputations: “What’s in it for me? What are the risks to me if I stop? What will people in my social circle think of me?” But the Samaritan was capable of thinking first about the victim: “What will happen to him if I don’t stop?” Perhaps, implicit in that thought was the Samaritan’s belief that his own soul would be irreparably damaged if he failed to attend to his neighbor’s needs. The Samaritan boldly left his fingerprints at the scene of the crime because he did not need to hide. I returned home exhausted by the awareness that the hateful rhetoric would likely escalate in the days ahead, that any attempt at conversation would be deemed evidence of being “far right” or “radical left.” As I stepped inside my home, I glanced back at the thumbprint on the sky and silently promised the One who had left it there that I will stop for a stranger in need regardless of his politics. Compassion is the high road and the only road out of this mess. |
AuthorLilli-ann Buffin Archives
November 2025
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