We Can All Do Better (10 page)

T
here's a common conception that human beings are basically selfish. One major political party says that the state must limit the effects of this inherent selfishness through laws and government regulation. The other says that our inherent selfishness can be controlled through the functioning of the free market, which maximizes individual freedom and encourages the rational weighing of costs and benefits, making self-interest mutually advantageous and helping everyone in the long run. What if each of these views proceeded from the wrong assumption—that people are basically selfish? What if, given a choice, most people would prefer to be unselfish—to cooperate, to help others, to work in teams? Might not that new way be the key to our future? One unselfish act is like a large rock tossed into a pond, with the ripples reaching the farthest shore.

In 2004, the president of Sirius Satellite Radio, Scott Greenstein, visited me. Over lunch he explained how disappointed he was by the lack of neutral voices in American politics. The presidential election
of that year was just getting under way, and to him it seemed that each side gave the public nothing but spin. Wouldn't it be great, he said, if someone could just tell the public the truth about the vast scope of our problems and what we'd have to do to solve them. Greenstein asked me if I wanted to do that kind of show on his network. I thought for a moment and replied that such a show interested me, but that I'd rather do one that allowed my listeners to hear the kind of stories from people that I'd heard during my forty years on the road, both as a basketball player and a politician. The deeper truth about America lies in the humanity of its people; I didn't want to do just another program on politics. Through the words of Americans themselves, I hoped to present a new perspective on the potential for a government “of, by, and for the people.”

The show is called
American Voices
(and I'm happy to say it's still going on). Usually I interview someone who has an unusual job—a boat pilot on the Columbia River, a window washer who works on New York skyscrapers, a groundskeeper at Boston's Fenway Park, a public-health nurse in the Aleutian Islands. Their stories convey the dignity of work, the insights people gain from what they do, and the satisfaction of a job well done. On every show, I also interview someone who is doing something selfless in his or her community. I interviewed Albert Lexie, a man who had shined shoes at the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh for forty-six years and put a portion of every tip he received into a fund to pay the medical bills of children from poor families. As of the day I interviewed him, he had put more than $100,000 into that fund.

Back when I was running for president, I would often say that this kind of story reflected the goodness of the American people, their generosity, flexibility, and unselfishness. I still believe that. When I began to look in earnest for similar stories for the show, they were easy to find. In fact, they flooded in: There's Carolyn Manning,
a woman in Phoenix who collects from local charities the names and addresses of new refugees in her area who have fled oppression somewhere in the world—Bosnia, Iraq, Sudan. Someone from Carolyn's organization, Welcome to America, meets with them to make a list of what they need. Manning then pays them a visit. When the door opens, she says, “Welcome to America,” often giving the new arrivals such things as a full set of linens and china. Frequently the families are taken aback. They come from places where the only people you can trust are members of your ethnic group or tribe, never a stranger. Yet here is this woman asking for nothing, just giving. It makes a profound impression. When she says, “Welcome to America,” it's not unusual for them to break into tears.

We're a stronger society in the long run if we help those who have fallen on hard times, so they can pick themselves up and move on. On one show, I talked with Thomas Weller, who drives the freeways around San Diego in a souped-up station wagon filled with tires and engine-repair equipment. When he sees people stranded alongside the road, he pulls up and helps them fix their car at no charge. I asked him to tell me about a memorable episode on the road. He said that one day he'd come to a particularly dangerous stretch of freeway and saw a family precariously crowded on the narrow shoulder behind their abandoned car. He pulled over, discovered quickly that they spoke no English, and motioned for them to take shelter behind the pillar of a nearby overpass. He somehow managed to make them understand that he'd come back with his equipment and help them. He returned about thirty minutes later, and when he came around the bend he saw that the family was still huddled behind the pillar but their car, which apparently had been hit by another car, was in flames. “Well, I guess I made a difference that day,” he said.

I asked him how he got started driving the roads and helping people. He said that one snowy winter night when he was sixteen
and living in Illinois, he was driving alone along a rural road and his car slid off into a snow bank. The motor died and the car was stuck. It got colder and colder. He began to worry. At that moment, a car pulled up. “What's the problem?” the driver asked, and offered to take him to the nearest town, which was fifteen miles away. When the Good Samaritan dropped him off, the boy said he'd like to do something in return, but the stranger wouldn't hear of it. When the boy persisted, he said, “Well, there
is
one thing you can do for me.”

“What's that?”

“Pass on the favor.”

“So,” the patroller of the San Diego freeways told me, “that's what I've tried to do for the past twenty-two years.”

Personal experience is life's best teacher. Sometimes it can produce lessons that reverberate out into the larger world. I interviewed Randy Lewis, a Walgreens drugstore executive who ran one of the company's six regional supply centers. Inspired by his autistic son, he asked the Walgreens board for permission to staff 30 percent of his workforce with disabled people. They agreed, and after he had hired people with autism, cerebral palsy, and Down syndrome, he found that productivity improved. For one thing, he said, autistic people do a better job of, say, moving boxes from place to place, because they tend to focus more intensely on repetitive action. What he hadn't expected was the effect that his decision had on the rest of his employees, who were proud of what hiring the disabled said about their company's values.

The 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act removed barriers to disabled people's participation in the daily activities of life, mandating such things as curb ramps, toilet grab bars, and wheelchair lifts on buses. What the act also did was to irrevocably change a national direction. Sometimes after passage of a direction-shifting
law it is necessary to aggressively enforce it. (Think civil rights here; the Justice Department filed suits against restaurants that continued to discriminate, or school districts that refused to desegregate.) But after a while, people's values impel them to go further than what the law requires—to its spirit, the dream it embodies. The Walgreens executive didn't need a law: He had his own personal relationship with disability; the law simply created a framework that allowed his request to be taken seriously. In this way, government can encourage people to act from the deeper impulses of love.

Sometimes when we overcome adversity, the experience allows us to find ourselves and guides us to what we really want to do with our life. Molly Barker, a North Carolinian and longtime runner, came from a family with a history of drinking problems. In her twenties and early thirties she seemed headed in the same direction. Then one day at age thirty-two, she went out for a run. She reached a point in the course when her head cleared, and she felt the endorphins flow and the calm descend. After the run, she vowed that she wanted to feel every day, all day, as she had felt on that run. She managed to give up drinking and started a group called Girls on the Run, which aims to show middle-school girls from eight to eleven years old, through running, the spontaneous power they have within, before society can squelch it. In one of Molly's groups was a girl named Brittany. She was mute. She spoke volumes with her eyes and her smile, but never uttered a word. Molly made some inquiries and discovered that Brittany could speak but never did. She had been severely and frequently beaten as a young child. On the last day of the twelve-week course and after each of them had finished a 5K, Molly asked all the girls to describe their experience in Girls on the Run. “Awesome,” said one. “Beautiful,” said another. “Fun,” said another. When it was Brittany's turn, she couldn't say anything. Molly was disappointed.

The next day the group held its appreciation banquet, at which the girls were given various awards. Brittany was called to the stage to get the Grand Communicator Award. As she took the trophy she pulled out a handwritten card and gave it to Molly, who read it to herself and then asked Brittany if she would like to read the card to her teammates. Brittany stepped to the microphone, held the card tightly with both hands, squinched up her eyes and then opened them and looked out at her teammates for what seemed like an eternity. Then she said, “The word I wanted to say on my last day out with Girls on the Run is love.” The girls and their families rose in unison and gave her a standing ovation.

When the spirit leads us to take selfless action on behalf of another person, we are expressing our deepest humanity, and that impulse emerges, often, in unforeseen places for unpredictable reasons. I interviewed Linda Bremner, a woman living outside Chicago, whose eleven-year-old son, Andy, had contracted terminal cancer. While Andy was being treated in the hospital, he got a lot of letters from family and friends, but when he came home, the letters stopped. He asked his mother one day, “Mom, have people stopped sending me letters because they know I'm going to die?”

“No, of course not,” his mother said. “You'll get more letters, I'm sure.” The next day, she started writing him letters signed “A secret pal.” If he had a bad week and had to stay home, she'd send him three letters; on a good week, when he attended school, she'd send him one. One night she came into the kitchen and saw him writing something. She tried to look at the piece of paper, but he pulled it away and asked her for an envelope. When she gave it to him, he stuffed his letter into it and asked her to deliver it to his “secret pal.” She started to open it, and he said, “No, not you, Mom. Give it to my secret pal.” After he'd gone to bed, though, she opened the letter. There was only one sentence. It read, “I love you, Mom.”

Several months later, Andy died, and some days after the funeral, while she was doing the painful job of going through his belongings, she found a shoebox on the floor of his bedroom closet. Although he had not been a particularly neat child, she discovered that inside the shoebox were all the letters from his “secret pal,” organized chronologically. In the bottom of the box was the address book he'd brought back from the Kids with Cancer camp he'd attended the previous summer. Out of her desire to pay tribute to Andy, she started writing letters to each child in the book, trying to buck them up as she had tried to buck up her own son. An amazing thing happened: She started receiving letters from all over the country asking her to write to another child somewhere who the letter-writer knew had cancer. She honored as many of these requests as she could and finally started a nonprofit organization called Love Letters. In ten years, she wrote over four thousand letters to children with cancer all across the country.

A concerned Sirius executive asked me one day, “What are you going to do when you run out of these kinds of stories?” It's never happened, and it won't, because there are millions of people out there just like the ones I've interviewed. When Americans are moved by something—poverty, homelessness, spousal abuse, failing schools, teenage pregnancy, absence of values, a deteriorating environment—many of them are impelled to do something directly to change the situation for the better. Since the early days of our Republic we have celebrated those who help their neighbors.

When we hear stories about Americans who take selfless actions, we're reminded of what we can do if our heart is big enough, our determination strong enough, and our talent focused enough. There are lessons here for government, too, with its massive resources. If government employees treat their work as just a job, government will fail to realize its potential. The ethos of the nonprofit culture is
to give to other people with no expectation of return. The ethos of the private sector is “perform or die.” Government is at its best when it combines the selflessness of the nonprofit culture with the accountability of the private sector. That's when it can help to transform the country.

Sometimes a national tragedy calls forth the spirit of our goodness. The greater the need in a crisis, the more we respond to the plight of individuals hard hit by forces beyond their control, and the more we say, “There but for the grace of God go I.” A few days after the World Trade Center towers fell on September 11, 2001, I made my way down to the site through streets crowded with the curious and the caring. I remember the stillness south of 14th Street. I remember the pungent odor of the smoldering buildings. I remember the faces of firemen covered by dark-gray dust as they emerged exhausted from looking for survivors in the rubble. Citizens applauded as a fire truck passed slowly down the street. Hundreds lined up outside a large tent that had been set up for pets, hoping they would find their lost dog or cat inside. I remember the messages and photos posted on makeshift bulletin boards around New York by family members hoping that their loved ones were not dead, just missing. Thousands of bouquets were left in appreciation at fire stations across Manhattan. I remember people sincerely thanking policemen, as if realizing for the first time that the police are there to protect us every day.