We say we value the legacy we leave the next generation and then saddle that generation with mountains of debt.
It’s going to take a while to rebuild manufacturing out here,” he said. “Ten years, minimum. But once we get the unions involved, we’ll have a base to negotiate from. In the meantime, we just need to stop the hemorrhage and give people some short-term victories. Something to show people how much power they have once they stop fighting each other and start going after the real enemy.” “And who’s that?” Marty shrugged. “The investment bankers. The politicians. The fat cat lobbyists.” Marty.
And yet I find myself returning again and again to my mother’s simple principle – “How would that make you feel?“ – as a guidepost for my politics.
That’s what empathy does – it calls us all to task, the conservative and the liberal, the powerful and the powerless, the oppressed and the oppressor. We are all shaken out of our complacency. We are all forced beyond our limited vision.
Values are faithfully applied to the facts before us, while ideology overrides whatever facts call theory into question.
The man was starting to get on my nerves. I asked him if he ever worried about becoming too calculating, if the idea of probing people’s psyches and gaining their trust just to build an organization ever felt manipulative. He sighed. “I’m not a poet, Barack. I’m an organizer.
Behind me, Billie was on her last song. I picked up the refrain, humming a few bars. Her voice sounded different to me now. Beneath the layers of hurt, beneath the ragged laughter, I heard a willingness to endure. Endure – and make music that wasn’t there before.
You might have told him that these instruments carried with them a dangerous power, that they demanded a different way of seeing the world. That this power could be absorbed only alongside a faith born out of hardship, a faith that wasn’t new, that wasn’t black or white or Christian or Muslim but that pulsed in the heart of the first African village and the first Kansas homestead – a faith in other people.
Still, I strongly resisted the idea of offering up my past in a book, a past that left me feeling exposed, even slightly ashamed.
Chicago, a town that’s accustomed to its racial wounds and prides itself on a certain lack of sentiment.
When Sadik lost his own lease, we moved in together. And after a few months of closer scrutiny, he began to realize that the city had indeed had an effect on me, although not the one he’d expected. I stopped getting high. I ran three miles a day and fasted on Sundays. For the first time in years, I applied myself to my studies and started keeping a journal of daily reflections and very bad poetry.
I was impatient in those days, busy with work and unrealized plans, and prone to see other people as unnecessary distractions.
What had Frank called college? An advanced degree in compromise.
I had given her a reassuring smile and patted her hand and told her not to worry, I wouldn’t do anything stupid. It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves.
I was intrigued by old Frank, with his books and whiskey breath and the hint of hard-earned knowledge behind the hooded eyes.
Whenever I first reached them on the phone, they would often be suspicious or evasive, uncertain as to why this Muslim – or worse yet, this Irishman, O’Bama – wanted a few minutes of their time.
Look. You can’t plan out your life. What you have to do is first discover your passion – what you really care about.
I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her.
Beautiful, aren’t they?” Dr. Collier said. “They really are.” “The change comes later. In about five years, although it seems like it’s coming sooner all the time.” “What change is that?” “When their eyes stop laughing. Their throats can still make the sound, but if you look at their eyes, you can see they’ve shut off something inside.
He would always be like that, my grandfather, always searching for that new start, always running away from the familiar. By the time the family arrived in Hawaii, his character would have been fully formed, I think – the generosity and eagerness to please, the awkward mix of sophistication and provincialism, the rawness of emotion that could make him at once tactless and easily bruised.