Month: November 2017

A while back, I used the first few lines of the story of the Good Samaritan to introduce a talk to our Rotary Club. I serve as Foundation chair, a grand-sounding title for the person who nags members about their gifts to the Rotary Foundation Annual Fund.

I was surprised when I checked out the story in the Gospel According to Luke. Jesus told the story in response to a question from a lawyer; who is my neighbor? When he finished telling the story, Jesus asked the man who in the story had proved himself to be “neighbor?” “The one who showed mercy,” the lawyer replied.

Many of us, we People of a Certain Age, have heard the story of the Good Samaritan many times. Certainly, the term “good Samaritan” has become part of our array of descriptors for charity, kindness, generosity, and so on. But mercy? That’s not a word we hear much in this context.

Look up the definition. In most instances, the first word used to define mercy is compassion. Then comes forbearance and similar terms that line up with ways we most often hear the word used; “have mercy on me.”

In a case of what must be synchronistic coincidence, three instances of Good Samaritan-like mercy crossed my consciousness around Thanksgiving. They became part of my list of things for which I am grateful, a list that seems to grow each year.

The first is the story of George Kaiser of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Mr. Kaiser models what I hope I would be were I a billionaire, as he is. Mark Sappenfield, Editor of Christian Science Monitor, said that people like Mr. Kaiser exemplify “the radical grace of humble hearts.”

The Monitor article is titled “A Billionaire’s War on Poverty,” an intentional dig at the failure of so many governments at so many levels in so many locations to combat the root cause of much of society’s ills.

Mr. Kaiser’s net worth is $12.5 billion. He signed the Giving Pledge in 2010, like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, resolved to give away most of his money. Kaiser started by funding pre-schools after reading the literature regarding brain development. Simon Montlake, the author, wrote “Kaiser’s next act will be his most audacious. Over the next decade, his foundation wants to target every poor child born in Tulsa, from birth until third grade, so that a patchwork of pubic programs—pre-natal care, parenting classes, child care—become a seamless quilt.”

Kaiser has started programs for adults, too, like Women in Recovery to work with incarcerated women as they transition back into society and Tulsa Art Fellows to support a growing arts community. A spinoff of this program explains how the Woodie Guthrie Center and a repository for the works of Bob Dylan ended up in Tulsa. Tourists will come to Tulsa, and the local economy benefits.

The article concludes, “Kaiser believes that he can make the lights go on in Tulsa. It might just take a generation before the children growing up today…will see the effect on their lives.”

A trip to Cambodia spurred an 8^th grader in Bellport on Long Island to action. She and three friends began “Four Girls for Families,” featured recently on PBS. The young woman said that seeing the families, especially the kids, on her family’s vacation trip not having some of the things she and her friends take for granted made her want to do something.

She has made many of the arrangements herself, interacting with people in Cambodia who could help her direct the money she intended to raise to give to people she did not know in a country not her own. She focused on clean water, and “Four Girls” have enabled the purchase of several thousand water filters for a host of communities in Cambodia. The girls have also built one school and have started a second. So far they have raised more than $300,000.

The girls on the Cross-Country team at Punahou in 2009 often ran through parks near the school for their workouts. Two girls took notice of the homeless people living in the parks and decided to do what they could to help. They found both a partner and an experienced participant in working with the homeless in the Institute for Human Services.

Thanksgiving 2009 the girls hosted the first Homeward Bound Race to End Homelessness, a 5K run at the Manoa Valley District Park. Participants pay to run. They get a T-shirt and a good feeling, more than a runner’s high. To date, the event has raised over $150,000 for IHS to use in combating homelessness.

By tradition, two senior girls are co-chairs each year. They are responsible for tapping their successors. They have also found at least seven sponsors to prime the pump with donations that are augmented by the entry fees. Their goal for 2017 was $20,000. They met it.

“The quality of mercy is not strain’d.

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heavens

Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest.

It blesseth him that gives, and him that gets.”

Once again, Shakespeare knew. Mercy, the radical grace of humble hearts.

Three stories, varying amounts of money, same mindset; mercy. And a quid for the quo, according to Will!

Daniel E. White

November 2017

The closing scene of the film features the German soldier, played by Richard Thomas, in a trench, alone at 10:30 a.m. November 11, 1918, thirty minutes before the armistice is to take effect at the 11^th hour of the 11^th day of the 11^th month. The soldier, a highly sensitive young man with a talent for drawing and a love of nature, has endured four years of horrendous bloodshed all around him in conditions that must have been grossly offensive to his character and sensibilities.

He has a piece of paper and a pencil in his hands. He hears a bird singing. A bird singing on a battlefield is unique but the guns are silent so the bird is not. He stands up to search for the bird, ready to sketch this welcome re-introduction of nature into his life.

We hear a shot. There is a small, red hole in the side of the soldier’s head as he falls to the ground. The last frame in the film is a simulated telegraph being typed: “all quiet on the western front.”

Comparatively speaking, the telegram is accurate.

I used the film teaching the World War One part of my Advanced Placement U.S. History class for years. It was a compact depiction of that war in which 19^th century tactics using 20^th century weapons produced large casualty counts. It helped me make the point that the forces of colonialism and nationalism were unleashed, to be sustained through World War Two, the Vietnam War, and many other wars of “national liberation.”

For the students and for me, it is the image of the soldier being shot at a point so close to the end of the fighting that remains vivid.

The scene repeats for me every Veteran’s Day, every 11^th day of the 11^th month. I also think about the millions of soldiers over time who have engaged in actions that require them to think differently than they might in normal life, to focus on survival, killing another human being, if necessary, one on the other side who is probably very much like themselves, only dressed in a different uniform and loyal to a different country or set of ideas.

In Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut has one of his characters complain about how he has had to learn how to do whatever it takes to survive, including killing others, and is then expected to return home to be a sensitive, caring, passionate husband and lover.

Years ago, we knew a couple whose marriage had, at that point, survived the man’s breaking his wife’s collarbone. He had been in Vietnam as a Green Beret. One day she surprised him from behind. Before he could stop himself, his training and instinct kicked in, and he whirled around to attack her.

In the movie, Frantz, the fiancé of a now-dead German solider visits his grave every day to refresh the flowers. One day, as she approaches the gravesite, she sees a strange man standing at the grave, deep in reflection. The man leaves, and the woman wonders who he is. Before long, she discovers that he is the French soldier who killed her fiancé. That dramatic tension fuels the rest of an excellent movie.

Veteran’s Day this year has had me thinking about the expectation that Vonnegut describes. The men, and now women, who have been in combat, seen comrades killed, perhaps been wounded themselves, have survived the “hell” General Sherman called war, return to civilian life to face challenges that are not visible to others.

It is significant to me that we hear frequently about veterans who have been in combat and do not want to talk about that experience in their lives. How can one make sense of hell?

Only in our lifetimes, People of a Certain Age, has medical science identified and treated Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Really? Haven’t generations of returning soldiers had to cope with PTSD without anyone recognizing its real effects on people or any significant treatment?

Our national response to the service of veterans over time has been variously supportive. Until the idea of PTSD came along, there was a history of referring to some veterans as having been “shell-shocked,” and that was not always said in a sympathetic manner. There have been numerous Marches on Washington by veterans groups seeking, at first, any pension, and then pensions at reasonable levels. We have only recently come to grips with the challenges faced by the Veterans Administration operating hospitals. A sizeable number of homeless people in our community are veterans.

Americans tended not to welcome Vietnam veterans home with celebratory parades. It was as though folks blamed the soldiers for the war.

Even the entertainment industry has needed to adjust. Remember the war movies of the 1950s and 60s? Contrast those myths about heroic deeds with the war movies of the Vietnam era (“The Deer Hunter,” “Coming Home”), and the current scene. There seems to be a greater understanding of the fact that General Sherman was right.

Casualty counts, dollars spent, territories defended and won or lost; these are among the obvious costs of war. This 11^th day of the 11^th month I was grateful to the veterans of combat for their bearing the unseen costs.

Daniel E. White

November 13, 2017