When covid was ramping up, my Dad and a family friend, Anand, set up a free aid station on the porch of my parents’ house. It was filled with toilet paper, sanitizer, and cleaning supplies. They made the local paper for what they were doing:
They took turns going to the store, waiting in line, buying essential items, and bringing them back to stick on the front porch under a sign that said “please take only what you need.”
My Dad is one of my heroes.
Now, the one thing that my Dad hates above all else is the feeling that his time has been or is being wasted by unnecessary bureaucracy. He's become notorious in the school he teaches in for inching towards the door at the end of meetings, slashing through the meeting-extending small talk at the tail end by going “so... Is the meeting over? I can go now, right?”
I've brought this practice to the school I teach in now.
On a walk with my father a few weeks ago, he told me that his pastor (whom I adore) offered him a position as a church elder/deacon. This pastor thought that the example my father sets by trying to help out in the community would bring new life to the current elders, who love “playing church.”
What does it mean to play church? It means sitting around on your ass arguing small points of biblical theology while other people suffer, and you do nothing. It means endless Bible studies with no action. The ultimate echo chamber.
My father told me on our walk that as soon as his Pastor offered him the deaconship, his heart rate spiked. AAAAH! Meetings! Bureaucracy! Ceremonies! Abort Mission! Run! He thought.
He turned down the position, telling the pastor: “Look, if you want me to organize some sort of community-benefiting activities for those guys to participate in, I'm your man. But I don't think I can make an impact in that system as it is. Those meetings would cut into my community time.”
When he told me the story on our walk, he said to me “You know, I think helping people is my church.”
This is why my Dad's my hero. He doesn't like getting dressed up and singing the songs and dancing for the show, playing church with everyone else. He puts his body where his beliefs are. He reminds me of the Marcus Aurelius quote:
“Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.”
Now, I'm not traditionally religious, but I'm a big fan of Jesus. There's plenty in the Bible that I don't like, but Jesus? What a guy.
Do you know who Jesus spent most of his time telling us not to be like? Bureaucrats! People obsessed with rules. People so mired in theology they couldn't see the forest for the trees.
If Heaven is really a place full of the old dudes in Bible study, sitting around talking and smugly patting themselves on the back about how right they were, I want no part of it. That sounds suspiciously like hell. If I may quote The Immortal Billy Joel:
“I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints.”
Real life is lived with the people of the world, not in an echo chamber ivory tower. Real service is hard, and gritty, and inconvenient, and looks nothing like a bunch of old dudes sitting in a room discussing theology.
Two great books I read this week:
From Here to Eternity: Travelling The World To Find The Good Death — Caitlin Doughty
“Death avoidance is not an individual failing; it’s a cultural one. Facing death is not for the faint-hearted. It is far too challenging to expect that each citizen will do so on his or her own. Death acceptance is the responsibility of all death professionals—funeral directors, cemetery managers, hospital workers. It is the responsibility of those who have been tasked with creating physical and emotional environments where safe, open interaction with death and dead bodies is possible.”
This book is informative and above all, hilarious. Doughty is a practicing mortician, perplexed by our cultural fear of death. This book is her attempt to find a culture less squeamish, one that hasn’t corporatized the funeral process and made cremation into big business.
The customs she finds in her travels are thought-provoking. She meets a Belizean who stole his grandmother’s body from the hospital because he didn’t want an autopsy performed. She travels to the United States’s only open-air funeral pyre.
The blurb on the front of my copy says “Think Bill Bryson doing an underworld special.” I had a fantastic time taking this journey with Caitlin, and I feel a lot more at peace with my own mortality after reading this book.
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery
“All grown-ups were once children... but only a few of them remember it.”
I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to read The Little Prince! What a fantastic book. I’d rate it up there with Chronicles of Narnia and Alice in Wonderland in its ability to help you re-capture the inner child.
It’s a fictional story of the author (a famous aviator in real life) crashing his plane into the Sahara, where he meets (hallucinates) a small prince from another planet, who’s traveled to earth from his own tiny planet.
This is one of those books that makes you laugh, cry a little bit, and go “huh, I never thought about life that way, but he’s so right! Here are some of the most memorable quotes:
“Grown-ups love figures... When you tell them you've made a new friend they never ask you any questions about essential matters. They never say to you "What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies? " Instead they demand "How old is he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make? " Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him.”
“I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that hasn’t much improved my opinion of them.”
“Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more.”
It’s only 110 pages long. Read it, I promise it’ll add something lovely to your life! And remember… Don’t act like a grown-up. At least not all the time.
A great podcast episode:
The Real Black Panthers-Throughline
What do you know about the Black Panther Party? I learned almost nothing about them in school, other than a brief mention of them as a “domestic terrorist organization.”
Now, after watching Judas and The Black Messiah, watching videos of Fred Hampton speaking, and listening to this amazing podcast, I don’t think that was a fair summary of them. The panthers created education and healthcare programs. They fed kids in their communities through breakfast programs. They armed themselves only for self-defense (legal in America).
If you’re looking to re-frame a piece of your historical understanding, and learn more about an organization that had every right to exist and was systematically silenced by the obsessive controlling hand of J. Edgar Hoover, this is the podcast episode for you!
And now, the feel-good news story of the week!
A company called Daimler Trucks has started accepting orders for all-electric freight trucks, starting manufacturing in 2022.
Gas-powered semis are the number-one cause of near-road air pollution. Shipping routes (frequented by semis) are more polluted than areas with higher amounts of car traffic. Semis consume huge amounts of fuel.
Thankfully, several companies are creating electric vehicles, seeing the writing on the wall. Volvo is making an electric truck, as is Tesla (Tesla’s looks by far the coolest).
It’s taken far too long, but electric vehicles are finally phasing in. They’re getting cheaper every day, too! There could be a fresher-air future within our lifetimes.
That’s all folks. Thank you for your time, I hope you have a wonderful weekend! As always, you can respond directly to interact with me. Please hit “like” or leave a comment if you liked what you read. If you really liked what you read, please hit share! We’ve almost reached 2000 people, so anything you can do to put us over the top would be appreciated :)
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