Young children of neglect and abuse never really know they are victims of neglect and abuse. They believe the terror is all normal. They know not freedom. They only know
We must rescue them.
“What Do You Do?”
“What do you do?”
I travel often. And I meet strangers on airplanes and restaurants, often. Curious people. And I always get nervous when they say, “What do you do?” I’m a CEO and I’m educated and I’m 54 years old — and I consider myself pretty confident — and I still get nervous when anyone asks, “What do you do?”
Business people are supposed to have a nice tidy “elevator speech” prepared for this question. Besides the fact that I was taught that it was rude to ask people “What do you do?” I refuse to prepare and memorize an “elevator speech.” Here’s why.
First, INTP/Enneagram 5 wing 4’s like me think too much. We overthink everything. And we possess this innate desire to be different. Besides all that, I don’t like the idea of memorizing some lame 30-second line to describe, me. Elevator speeches are stupid because there’s no possible way to summarize what anyone does in thirty seconds. Unless you are a barber or student or brain surgeon or something like that. But I’ve never had normal jobs like those.
You probably think that’s stupid and non-strategic for me to forego that elevator speech. All the management experts say you need an elevator speech to quickly hook someone into your business. I don’t want to hook anyone tho.
Second, I’m into authenticity. Elevator speeches just seem fake to me. I’m not saying that if you use elevator speeches that you are fake. I’m not even saying even that at all. I’m just saying that to me they are fake. Again, you might think I’m too idealistic or whatever but, there you go – elevator speeches seem fake to me.
Third, INTP/Enneagram 5 types are prone to stumble over our words. Hard to describe this phenomenon. Between the (overthinking) brain and the movements of my tongue and cheeks and jaw is this kind of delay thing that happens. People often tell me I seem “serious.” I think part of the reason is that when I speak I have to concentrate super hard on making sure that what is “in” my brain and the words I speak, match. It’s not easy – I’m telling you, it’s not.
And since I don’t memorize elevator speeches, I’m left to, extemporaneously, answer the curious people question, “What do you do.”
I usually say what I end up saying, with pauses and “
Then I tell them that I don’t really get to work directly with the children in the way our volunteers do – that as the CEO I meet with donors and government leaders and stakeholders in our organization. Then they say, “Yeah but still you are helping people.”
That makes me feel good. (I do get to, once and a while, visit some of our programs and interact with the precious children. In the summer I did visits in Sacramento and San Diego and Dallas and Pennsylvania. And last week I did a visit to Poland.)
Anyway, I’m not sure elevator speeches are necessary. Maybe they are, I don’t know. But I’m going to continue to just give a non-rehearsed answer when the curious people ask, “What do you do?”
It goes something like this.
“I lead an international non-profit organization of 16,000 volunteers. Last year these amazing volunteers gave over 2.6 million hours toward working with children. Not just children, victims of neglect, abuse, and abandonment. We work alongside the government. Social Services locates the children for us, children in foster care. Our volunteers provide direct one-on-one mentoring, guidance, trauma-based interaction, fun, self-esteem activities, acceptance, structure, and most of all love.
“We work with the most at-risk population there is – minor children whose guardians, the ones who were supposed to love and nurture them, hurt and abandoned them, instead. We are an organization made up of Christians, but our goal is not to convert the children in any way. We just want to love them.
“We have a small staff – for every paid staff member, there are over 1,000 non-paid volunteers. We are committed to helping confront abuse, change lives, and transform communities. Because, statistics tell us that the way to prevent academic failure, substance abuse, teenage pregnancy, sex trafficking, homelessness, incarceration, and rehabilitation, is to prevent it before it happens.
That’s what I say. But it’s not exactly that, of course.
You can learn more if you want here: www.rfk.org
She Cried And I Cried.
Last week I trudged through Terminal C at Dallas Fort Worth airport. Our plane broke down. We were headed to DC. We sat in a 95-degree airplane on the tarmac, for three hours. They returned us to the gate. I rushed to see if I could grab another flight; I had an important meeting on Friday morning. The lady at the gate — head down, typing — mumbled, “Go to American Airlines Customer Service at C25.”
I am rushing to C25. I’m zig-zagging through hundreds of other stranded travelers. I looked up and I saw this woman, crying. Not just kinda crying — like, crying. I first noticed her when she was about 15 feet in front of me, walking in my direction. She had dishwater blonde hair. Shoulder length. Wearing a black blouse, she looked to be in her 40’s.
I got that “I wonder what’s wrong?” thought in my head. You start feeling sad inside; it always happens when you see a person crying in public. If a baby is crying it can agitate you. But when an adult cries, you just immediately feel for them. You know what I’m talking about.
It would have been completely awkward to ask her what’s wrong. Especially given that we are all rushing around a hot airport. We were all going somewhere. It’s not like she was alone on a park bench or something. Even then, it would still be weird for a 54-year-old man to interrupt some woman, crying alone on a park bench. But not as weird as it would be in a crowded airport, while she’s rushing to get somewhere.
After I passed the crying lady, and while I was feeling that “I wonder what’s wrong?” feeling, I thought about this yoga class I took a few years ago. At my studio, after class ends, you lie in savasana. You are instructed to be quiet. You are instructed to lie still for a least a few minutes. (I always stay longer than anyone else, for at least 10 minutes, because when else do you ever get to lie on your back in a public place in total silence without people think you are a
I passed the crying lady in the Dallas airport, and then I just prayed a little prayer for her.
Physicalists would like to reduce crying to a physiological state of affairs, in the same
But crying and pain must be more than mere physical activity. Maybe physicalists want to reduce all human emotion to physics because they are afraid (another phenomenon they reduce to physics lol) of the powerful reality of human emotions.
We all feel sadness. We all feel pain. So, sometimes, we cry. That subjective experience of ours — itself — cannot be explained, scientifically. You can’t view the experience of feeling sadness under a microscope.
My flight to DC was canceled. I arrived the next day. Took 27 hours to get from LA to DC. I missed my Friday morning meeting. I went for a run. I ended up standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
And I cried.
I cried because he stood for truth and justice. I cried because our nation today doesn’t seem like it stands for truth and justice.
I’ve been told that I seem aloof or hard on the inside. But I’m a crier. My mom was a crier. Her father was a crier.
My father seems hard on the inside. He is a crier.
I don’t know why crying should be embarrassing.
You don’t really ever see men crying in public. You really don’t really ever see men cry at all.
Throwing Mom In The Trash.
I don’t go to Starbuck’s too often. I do when I travel, though. I think because Starbucks feels familiar.
It felt familiar in Saint Louis last week.
It felt familiar in Louisville and Fort Collins and even in Sydney a few weeks before.
And don’t know of any coffee houses for locals that compare to my local, Kean Coffee.
I think Kean has the best coffee you can find. The owner, Martin Deitrich, was awarded this distinguished coffee lifetime achievement award. From the International Guild of Coffee. (I’m not sure if that’s the name of the guild but his award was a really big deal and he told me they’ve only given like 9 of them, ever.)
Anyway, I don’t want to write about coffee right now. I want to write about… waste. And guilt. And ethics — what should one do?
I hate wasting stuff. But not as much as mom. My mother has a scarcity mentality. Or, she had it before the stroke. She spent her life trying to save and conserve stuff. She didn’t waste anything. I’m not even kidding. She would rewash those cheap plastic cups. She saved those wires they put on bread bags. Her mother, my Nonna, would rewash those cheap paper plates —the white ones that always had stains on them after use.
Mom was always walking around the house turning off lights in every room.
One time I walked in and found her on the dining room table. Literally standing up — a 70-year-old lady swaying around — removing half of the bulbs in the chandelier. To “save electricity.”
She could have killed herself.
I’d hate to live that way if I’m honest. I am most certainly a conservationist, but not her version. I don’t lose sleep over the fact that Americans are the most wasteful people on the planet. I think Mom did. I even think her scarcity mentality about waste could have led to her stroke.
A few years ago, she was doing a wedding. She was a florist. As a part-time thing. And she had all these white five-gallon buckets for the flowers. Like 20 of them. And after she made all the bouquets, there were all these empty buckets in her garage, half-filled with water. I saw her carrying one of them into the back yard. They were pretty heavy. Each one probably had three to four gallons. And one gallon of fresh water weighs over 8 pounds.
So I ask my 70-year-old mother who’s lugging this 30-pound bucket of water, “Mom, what are you doing? Do you need help?”
Mom didn’t ever really like help with things. She was kind of a martyr in a way. So I just jumped in to help her because I didn’t want her to break her back.
In her garage was a sink. So I grabbed one of the buckets. I went to empty it (in the obvious place where anyone would empty a bucket of water). Mom intervenes: “Don’t waste the water, you can use it to water the plants in the back yard!”
She was serious and emotional. Scarcity mentality does that to you. I’m not even kidding, it can make you almost crazy.
Three to four gallons of water costs way less than a penny. And there was no drought; we were past that. So I’m like, “Mom, seriously, a gallon of water costs about $.001 cent!” I can be pretty logical sometimes and as I get older I’m realizing that sometimes emotion can dwarf logic. But I wasn’t thinking about that, I just didn’t want to carry all these buckets to the back yard to save an entire penny.
And then she, in the martyry way of hers, grabs it out of my had, “Fine, I’ll do it myself,” and she starts lugging it away so she could live by her scarcity mentality
“Okay Mom, I’ll conserve that water!” I didn’t have to, but the thought of watching her would have made me feel really guilty and I hate feeling guilty, especially when it comes to my mom. I think most sons don’t want to feel guilty for letting their moms down.
When I go to Starbucks, when I travel, I always ask them to not give me a plastic lid. But it’s not not in the spirit of my conservationist mother. I like to drink coffee and everything else out of the glass or cup. Those lids get in the way. I don’t use straws. Not because of my mild conservationist proclivities and mom’s indoctrination, but because I just prefer to sip out of the cup. It tastes better.
Last week in Saint Louis, I told the barista, “No lid please,” but then she quickly slipped one of these sleeves on the cup. I almost
But while I was drinking my grande latte with an extra shot and whole milk (why would anyone ever drink nonfat milk?) I kept thinking about that sleave.
And the
And I felt the Starbucks Lady’s eyes were Mom’s eyes — glaring at me, with that guilting look of hers, the one she used when I didn’t want to save her that penny.
Don’t you dare dare throw away this sleeve.
I stressed for 10 minutes about this utterly insignificant first world problem — or not so first world problem. Me and my overthinking — or not over thinking — about this shred of recycled paper.
Two simultaneous thoughts — “Don’t disappoint mom who is staring at me and “This sleave is utterly insignificant to the issue of global waste.”
I
I felt I did the right thing, the barista did not.
But mom matters more.
No Failure Of Nerve
Students on the streets of China, soldiers on the beaches of Normandy.
We celebrate their nerve this week. The nerve of true radicals. The nerve of true heroes. The nerve of those with guts — ones with the audacity to believe THEY could face down power, tyranny, and genocide.
These radicals, at different places and times but united in cause, stared into the eyes of brainwashed minds — and their bullets— and screamed, “No you won’t!”
They knew some things matter more than self-preservation — truth, justice, liberty for all people, freedom to worship, freedom of the press.
As we celebrate them — dead and alive — let us also recognize that no society is too far from the return of those insidious IDEAS — xenophobia (the fear of “others”), nationalism (“Make our country great at any cost”), tribalism (“My political party is good and the ‘other’ political party is evil”), propaganda (The use of blatant lies and deceit to brainwash the ignorant), and relentless attacks on the free press & institutions of accountability.
Bravo to those heroes. And bravo to those today — those who, in solidarity, have the nerve to speak-up and prevent history from repeating itself.