You're Better than You Think You Are

If you happened to be awake and on the Internet in the early morning hours of October 2, you probably saw a non-stop stream of people offering help to strangers in the middle of the night. People offered rides, shelter, water, food--even their own blood--to anyone in need.

I've written before about how we see the best in people in the midst of a crisis or in the wake of a tragedy, how having life abruptly stripped to its essentials reminds us of what's most important. This time, it occurred to me that people aren't really different in those moments at all. They've simply been shaken free of distractions and remembered who they truly are.



If you stood in line for hours to donate blood in the wake of the Vegas shooting, you care about human life--even the lives of strangers.


If you had power during Hurricane Sandy and you threaded an extension cord and power strip out your front gate and left a note that anyone who needed to charge a phone or other device was free to share, you understand that even small contributions can make a huge difference to people in need--and you're willing to make those contributions.

If you immediately responded to the more recent round of hurricanes with donations to organizations working on the ground, you understand that providing relief to those in crisis is important--and you're willing to back that understanding with your wallet.

If you offered a place to sleep, or food, or water, then you don't like to see people hungry, thirsty and tired due to circumstances beyond your control--and you're prepared to do something about it.

This time, when the crisis ends, try to remember those things about yourself. You don't have to change your priorities or try to be a better person or anything so ambitious...you just have to remember who you are.

Every day of your life, you'll encounter a person who is hungry or thirsty or frightened, a person who needs a ride or just an encouraging word. Every day of your life, there are people in the world whose lives could be changed in some small (or huge) way by a small effort or contribution on your part. Every day of your life, you will meet a person on the street (or in the grocery line or on the telephone when you're angry because your cable doesn't work) whose day can be immeasurably brightened or darkened by the way you speak to him or her.

In those moments, don't tell yourself that you should care. Don't try to be better than you are. Instead, remind yourself that you DO care--that when confronted with those very same needs in an attention-catching way, you cared more about strangers than your comfort, keeping your car clean, whatever other plans you had for that money, getting a good night's sleep. That's who you are. Sometimes, that person gets buried or distracted by day-to-day life, responsibilities, stresses, even the quest for a new toy. But, when the chips are down and we see inside you, you're a person who stands for hours in the Vegas sun to give his blood to a stranger.

Don't forget that. Let us see that person every day.

It's the End of the World as We Knew It...

and I guess I feel fine. Life is good. But, I'm experiencing a rare bout of nostalgia.

Thursday night, changing clothes, putting on make-up, using grape-scented spray to make our hair even bigger, walking the mile from our dorm to Otto's.

Yesterday afternoon, DeKalb historical photographer Brad Oropeza (who also happens to be my daughter's boyfriend) called me from the corner of First and Lincoln Highway to tell me he was watching the building formerly known as Otto's being reduced to rubble.

The bar has been closed for a long time, and I hadn't been inside in much longer. Music had changed, Cosmopolitans had been invented, and life had gone on.

I've passed by that building, sitting quiet and empty, hundreds of times over the past couple of years. That slice of the world as we knew it ended long before they started knocking down the walls, and sometimes it made me a little sad to see it dark and cold. But, I generally don't give much time or attention to the past.

For a moment on Monday afternoon, that changed.  I looked at the pile of broken brick and stone where I'd sat down on the stairs and laid out every student ID, credit card and library card for the bouncer who didn't want to accept my state ID, and I saw my friends half a lifetime ago. I felt the familiar floor under my feet.

The things that happened there were for the most part not significant. A strange man disbelieved me when I told him my name, because a Tiffany song was playing when he asked. A friend fell on our way in the door, early and totally sober. The place was nearly empty at 8 p.m., and we persuaded her that no one had seen--but hours later, someone passing by said, "Aren't you the girl who fell?"

I cried over a friend I wished were more. Our table cleared when "I Melt With You" started to play. I walked away and left a beautiful but arrogant Greek soccer player standing alone on the dance floor. A man on the sidewalk outside sang "You are So Beautiful" to me. I did watermelon shots for the first time on the evening after another big first.

It was only a year. An academic year, in fact, not a full one. But, it was the year I turned 21. A year when the world was unfolding in front of me in exciting and unpredictable ways, and the dark, crowded bar was filled with music and people and sights and smells that were familiar and comfortable. It's been 29 years to the week since I graduated, and yesterday I found out that a lot of ghosts had been living in that abandoned building.

Last Train to Clarksville

It's the end of the summer of 1990. I'm 24 years old and driving from Georgia to the Chicago suburbs in my 1979 Mustang, accompanied by my 16-year-old sister, my friend Kim, and a toy poodle. Somewhere along the endless, multi-state stretch of Route 65, we see an exit sign for Clarksville, Tennessee.

Naturally, we decide to get off the Interstate and go looking for the train station. I'd like to blame this on my sister. Not only was she a huge Monkees fan as a child, but just this week she argued that they'd "held up." I can't, though. We were all equally eager to visit the famous train station and...take pictures? Sing? 

Our hopes were dashed, though.

After searching in vain for the train station or a visitor center--remember, there was no GPS or even Google in 1990--we spotted a bearded man walking down the street and pulled over. I rolled down my window and asked, "Can you tell us where the train station is?"

My sister says she still remembers the expression on his face. It only held for an instant, and then he laughed and said, "There's no train station here."

We laughed at ourselves as we made our way back to the Interstate, but I think we were all more than a little disappointed. It wasn't that we didn't get to SEE the train station so much as the sad news that it wasn't real.

27 years and dozens of hilarious retellings of this story pass.

It's Easter Sunday of 2017 and I'm sitting at my mother's kitchen table with my mother, my sister, my 21-year-old daughter and my daughter's boyfriend, who is a photographer specializing in historic sites (this becomes important later).

Well, not much later.

We tell the story. 

My sister says, "The look on that guy's face!" 

I look to my right, and I see that look again. This time, it's not followed by laughter. Instead, my daughter's boyfriend quietly passes me his cell phone.

This is on the screen:

Yeah, that's the historic Clarksville train station.

Unbelievably, this story that's been making us laugh (and others laugh at us) for nearly three decades just got funnier.

My sister and I had just been discussing a weekend trip around my birthday in June, and it's decided. We're going to Clarksville. We're TAKING THE TRAIN TO CLARKSVILLE. Maybe Kim (who I've seen only once in those 27 years) will want to MEET US IN CLARKSVILLE. 

On the way home, I say to my daughter, "So, there's a train station in Clarksville. This is the best thing that's ever happened to me."

"I'm glad to hear that," she says, "Because it could have been the worst."

This morning, just before I started to write this post, I consulted Google to get a picture of the train station. In the process, I learned that although there IS a train station in Clarksville and there IS a military base not far away, the writers of that song didn't know either of those things at the time. The original draft used "Clarksdale," which was a stop on their own train line, and they changed it because Clarksville sounded better.

We're going anyway.

January 24, 2017 in America

Earlier today, an online friend asked me to lie to her and tell her I thought we were all going to be okay. She’s an intelligent woman and not someone I’d think of as a head-in-the-sand type, and I’m pretty sure she knows I’m not going to lie. But, her comment made me think about what I’ve been putting out into the world for the past couple of months. So, this post is part balance, part mea culpa. None of it is a lie.

I do believe that we are at greater risk for both nuclear engagement and terrorist attacks on American soil than at any point in history. I also believe these potential conflicts, should they arise, will have a devastating impact on the world as a whole. I can’t sugar coat that, and those are risks I think most people aren’t taking seriously enough, so I tend to reiterate them.

I can count on my thumbs the number of times in my adult life that I’ve been able-bodied and clear-headed and entirely unable to think of a productive step to take. That’s the position I’m in now, and it’s beyond uncomfortable for me. It’s downright frightening.

In the wake of the election, I knew exactly what to do, from working with the faithless elector movement to providing legal research to some important (but ultimately unsuccessful) efforts to set things right. If our current administration starts bar coding Muslims or making good on some of our new President’s other insane promises, I know how to fight that.

I do not know of a single thing I, or you, can do to minimize the chances that Donald Trump will provoke a war out of ego and inexperience, nor that his anti-Muslim rhetoric will convince the Muslims of the world that we are their enemy. I’m not a marcher. I need direct, productive action steps. The uncharacteristic sense of helplessness I feel in not having an action step regarding these all-important issues, I think, makes me sound more alarmist than people are accustomed to.

That’s real.

But, it’s not the whole story.

I believe the vast majority of Republicans are not insane. The current legislature will undoubtedly make many decisions we don’t agree with and some, like the swift changes to health care legislation, will have a significant impact on millions of people. But, we can fight bad law. It’s happened before and it will happen again—at any point in time, our legislature seems wrong-headed and destructive to some of us. The current state of the legislature is, from my perspective, very bad news. But, it’s not cause for panic. When people say “he has both houses of Congress,” I don’t think that’s accurate. Paul Ryan and his ilk are not my kind of legislators, but they are not Donald Trump.

I believe that people with more information and more power than you or I are doing their jobs. That includes the U.S. intelligence community. These are people who—again, political beliefs aside—have devoted their lives to the security of the United States of America. They know more about Trump’s ties to Russia, his history and his financial dealings than we do, and if they conclude that he is under the influence of Putin, colluded with Russia or is otherwise intentionally acting against the interests of the country, I do not believe they will stand by and allow that to continue.

I am connected with a network of more than 120,000 attorneys who are committed to fighting to keep this country what it was meant to be—and, of course, there are many others who don’t happen to be part of this group. Members of this group started the faithless elector research, provided research assistance for the elector lawsuit in Colorado, uncovered the 50+ electors who were not legally entitled to serve in that capacity and started the early research on standing to file suit on the conflicts of interest issues. Others are teaching workshops to allow attorneys in other fields to step in and defend protesters, provide immigration assistance and fill other emerging needs.

Many of them, like me, are in a state of uncertainty. We’re mourning, angry and frightened just like every thinking person in the world. But, we don’t stay this way.  Our nature and our training is to analyze and act—and we’re just one group.

I am also very encouraged by the response from the rest of the world. Although it makes me physically ill to see other countries protesting the inauguration of the U.S. President in the same way they protested apartheid and the Tienanmen Square massacre, I am heartened to see that both citizens and governments around the world are prepared to act, and that they seem to see clearly that it is an individual and not our system or our people that pose a threat.

When tragedy and danger strike hand-in-hand, it’s disorienting. But, the initial shock passes. History says we’re a resilient people, and that once you get our collective attention, we can move mountains.

Meanwhile, our new President seems wholly preoccupied with his inauguration numbers and convincing himself that we don’t really disdain him as much as it appears. There’s a lot of criticism flying about that, but I’m happy to see it. The longer he remains distracted, the more time he invests in tweeting about his television show and persuading himself that a lot of people came to his inauguration, the less damage he’s doing. And, while he’s arranging for ringers to make it seem like what he says is well-received, intelligent, competent people around the country are shaking off the shock and mobilizing.