Opinion/Brown: Youthful sources of inspiration for the coming year
In the endless litany of violence and stupidity that makes so much of our news, it’s a good spiritual practice to look for things to admire and be grateful for. Maybe that’s why various organizations pick this time to declare “Persons of the Year.” I’ve been writing for this paper since Ronald Reagan was president, so it’s time I tried it myself.
After teaching for 45 years, it seems natural to take my hope from young people. This kind of inspiration showed up in my very first year of teaching. A boarding school hired me to teach English and start a public speaking program. We practiced in the school’s lecture hall. One of my students was an Ethiopian refugee — an orphaned victim of starvation and disease. He moved around painfully on old Franklin Roosevelt style crutches. Everything, it seemed, was difficult, yet he faced life cheerfully.
We were debating that old perennial topic, abortion. I forget the young man's name, but he was against it. When it was his turn, he toiled laboriously down the sloping stairway toward the stage. When he got there, he had no notes.
“I was born,” he said, “in a place that had nothing. We had no food; we had no medicine. People were dying all the time. What do you have when you have nothing? You have love. Babies were being born all the time, too. You might say it would be better if they weren’t, but what do you do when these babies are born? You love them with all your strength. I think even if you have nothing to give them but love and you bathe them with your own tears, you give them that.”
“Look at me,” he said. “Had I not been loved, I wouldn’t exist. How could that have been better?” He looked at his audience of privileged white boys and began his painful process back up the stairs. The hall was quiet, save for the scraping of his crutches on the floor, and his labored breathing. After a few moments, a boy on the opposing team spoke up.
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“Mr. Brown,” he asked, “I don’t know the rules of debating yet. Can we just surrender now — or do we have to go through with this?”
This is my first story. I’m getting warmed up now.
I met my second young hero the year after. He was a local boy, one of the rare day kids at a boarding school. He was suffering from a debilitating illness that left him frail and tiny. He was not expected to live long if I recall correctly, but he studied hard. All I can remember after so many years was my wonderment. Here was a boy with no practical reason to be studying at all. What was the point? To get into a good college and die there, if he hadn’t already? To prepare for a job? Here was the lesson being offered every day, and its simplicity hit me hard. It was simply better to know than to not know. That’s why he was still toiling away in school. It’s where the learning was — and in the absence of any other motivation, the boy was pursuing knowledge for its own sake.
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I had just begun what would be the central mission of my life and already had my first two heroes. There would be more, of course, hundreds of them eventually. But now it’s time to point out someone you’d know too, young Greta Thunberg. She might be on the autism spectrum somewhere, a little Aspergery maybe. As a middle school kid in her native Sweden, she skipped school and stood outside Parliament with a simple sign, asking the grown-ups to stop wrecking her planet.
This 15-year-old girl started a global movement. Now she’s invited to the U.N., to global conferences where she listens to the big shots, then comes to the microphone and she calls them out for too much, "Blah, blah, blah."
“Hope has to be earned,” Greta says. Trust, too.
Meanwhile, what have we accomplished on our kids’ behalf? We’ve almost run out the clock on them. We’ve sold ourselves so many guns, we’ve taken to writing off school shootings as a cost of doing business. Almost 60 years after we were shown our first evidence of global warming, we’ve let the decades blow by. Our children cannot grow up fast enough to prevent the calamity we’ve left for them, and still they put their shoes on every morning and go to school, singing hymns in the lion’s mouth. They struggle. They’re afraid, and they do it anyway, often joyfully. I would be young with them any time. It would be an honor.
Lawrence Brown is a columnist for the Cape Cod Times. Email him at columnresponse@gmail.com.
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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Opinion columnist looks to the young for inspiration in the new year
