A stranger smiled at me as we came around a corner and met at the end of an aisle in Wal-Mart yesterday at City Centre Mall. I smiled back. As I carried on just a few steps beyond, I heard him say, “Excuse me, can you help me?” I turned back thinking that maybe in spite of my cart, he thought I was an employee and he was looking for help finding merchandise. He wasn’t. He was simply a man hoping I could spare him some change. I did. Whatever change I had in my pocket became his. “Merry New Year,” he said, which made me smile again, thinking how he had blended the Christmas and New Year’s greetings. The whole encounter took less than a minute. But it left me thinking. What kind of world would we live in if our default position was always (or even usually) to simply do the right thing? Ask if we need, give if we can without mentally applying some means or character test to instantly determine for ourselves the worthiness of the recipient. Not to give out of guilt. Not to give, but give begrudgingly because we all know we have to mind our nickels and dimes. But just do what we know is intuitively the right thing to do. I certainly don’t pretend I do this all the time. I don’t. And I know if the same man had approached me not in the store, but perhaps aggressively panhandled me in the parking lot just outside the doors of Wal-Mart, quite likely even intoxicated, I’d have been far less likely to give him anything. I know that’s true because I’ve done it.
The thing is this. On a macro scale, I have penned many editorials and columns over the years where I quoted U.S. Civil War Republican president Abraham Lincoln famously saying, “It is a sin to remain silent when it is your duty to protest.” Or a century later, Martin Luther King: “From every mountainside, let freedom ring.” And also another former U.S. president, a Democrat, Bill Clinton, in his first inaugural address in 1993: “By the words we speak and the faces we show the world, we force the spring … now, we must do the work the season demands. In serving, we recognize a simple but powerful truth – we need each other. And we must care for one another … but for fate, we – the fortunate and the unfortunate – might have been each other.” Or even, “Hell no, we won’t go” Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) emeritus profess of linguistics Noam Chomsky’s famous Vietnam War era dedication in his first book in 1967, American Power and the New Mandarins: “To the brave young men who refused to serve in a criminal war.”
Writing in 1978 in his book, Robert Kennedy and His Times, the American historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger, commenting in the foreword, just a decade after the New York senator’s assassination in Los Angeles, said Kennedy “possessed to an exceptional degree what T. S. Eliot called an ‘experiencing nature.’ History changed him, and, had time permitted, he might have changed history. His relationship to his age makes him, I believe, a ‘representative man’ in Emerson’s phrase – one who embodies the consciousness of an epoch, who perceives things in fresh lights and new connections, who exhibits unsuspected possibilities of purpose and action to his contemporaries.”
The thing is this also. On a micro scale in day-to-life, those very large ideals of the likes of Kennedy, Chomsky, Clinton and Lincoln for most of us can be best lived when we feel real empathy and compassion for someone who is no longer the “other.” It’s something a man like Jean Vanier, son of Canadian governor general Georges Vanier, has spent his life living.
Take AIDS for instance.
The AIDS epidemic officially began on June 5, 1981, when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report newsletter reported unusual clusters of Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP) caused by a form of Pneumocystis carinii in five homosexual men in Los Angeles.
I wrote about AIDS some in the 1980s. And I remember the climate of fear in 1986 that reporters were not untouched by when we were assigned stories that meant going inside provincial reformatories and federal penitentiaries to interview HIV-positive prisoners in Ontario. The high callings of journalism are to speak truth to power, as well as comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. But exactly how AIDS was transmitted in terms of morbidity and mortality was not completely understood 30 years ago. So I watched with surprise and unexpected admiration as C. Everett Koop, an evangelical Christian, who served as surgeon general under U.S. Republican president Ronald Reagan from 1982 to 1989, and was well known for wearing his uniform as a vice admiral of the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, had the singular political courage to speak the truth about the science of AIDS as our knowledge increased. According to the Washington Post, “Koop was the only surgeon general to become a household name.”
I also read San Francisco Chronicle reporter Randy Shilt’s landmark book on the early years of the AIDS epidemic, And the Band Played On, published in 1987. Three years later in 1990, Campbell Scott, son of the legendary actor George C. Scott, a 28-year-old actor at the time, playing the character “Willy” in the movie Longtime Companion, captured the poignancy of those days in the early 1980s when he observed in the movie’s final scene, “it seems inconceivable, doesn’t it, that there was ever a time before this, when we didn’t wake up every day wondering whose sick now, who else is gone?” as Cecil County, Maryland bluegrass singer Zane Campbell’s haunting Post-Mortem Bar is heard in the background. If you read the comments from viewers on a YouTube clip linked to here you get some idea of the power of the ending and how some 25 years on it resonates with people still as the moment that AIDS was brought home for them and was no longer just a problem for some queers in San Francisco. You can listen to it and watch it on YouTube here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dukIb4UU094
By the time Jonathan Demme, Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington and Bruce Springsteen brought Philadelphia to the screen in 1993, with Hanks’ haunting performance as AIDS-infected lawyer Andrew Beckett, which netted him the Academy Award for Best Actor, along with Springsteen, whose song Streets of Philadelphia won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, AIDS was no longer an abstraction to many of us. We knew people who had Hepatitis C. We knew people who were HIV positive or had full-blown AIDS.
And that’s when empathy and compassion arrive. At the same time Philadelphia was being released in December 1993, I remember the main Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) outlet on Sherbrooke Street in Peterborough letting the Peterborough AIDS Resource Network (PARN) collect donations alongside the Salvation Army bell ringers with their kettles that Christmas of 1993. While I was a graduate student at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario at the time, I remember being back in Peterborough one December Saturday morning before Christmas and working the PARN donation time slot with a friend who was a member of PARN.
Changes come.
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