The Contagion of Gratitude

I am pretty certain that more ink has been spilled in the name of spite and slander than ever has been devoted to gratitude and generosity. Looking toward the impending Thanksgiving holiday, please grant me a moment to challenge our baser experience in an homage to gratitude. Here are a two examples. 

Example one. An insurance company is currently running a television ad showing a woman re-center a stranger's cup of coffee poised at table's edge. A man who sees the the woman move the coffee cup helps a mother remove her child's stroller from a bus. A woman who sees the mother helped with the stroller pulls another man from a cascade of falling boxes. A driver who sees the man saved from falling boxes allows another man to pull safely into traffic. A witness to the assisted driver raps a warning on the backdoor of a truck whose driver is backing blindly into a parked motorcycle. And then it ends as it began--a circle of kindness and gratitude among strangers. Maybe you have seen it.

One might understand why a helped person would extend the courtesy of a thank you to the helper at the time of the courtesy.  That's just being polite. What is not explained by the spite and slander crowd, however, is why someone who only sees an individual assisted would extend himself to help a stranger somewhere down the road.

Example two. My mother has the energy of a tornado and the stamina of a draft horse. At 79-years young, she still works full time as a public school child nutrition professional. Mom has lived alone most of the 31 years since my father's death. She is now sheltering my brother recovering from a severe lung infection for which he was hospitalized for over three weeks. Everyone who knows my mother knows her to be loving and generous. It was not always so.

Raised by a taciturn father and a paranoid, emotionally-volatile mother, young Barbara ran away from home, married young, and started a family. Into her first-born son, she poured all the love she felt herself denied. Still and for many years, it was difficult for her to utter the words, "I love you, Son." The big chill was even more pronounced for my siblings born into more difficult years of the family.

Those of you who are grandparents may understand the next part of the story. When my son, Chris, was born, it was as if the floodgates of Barbara's heart were open, and all the I love yous that for a half a century she was afraid to utter flowed as freely as water over the dam of a swollen lake.

All this to say that Mom called me this morning to tell me she loved me and appreciated me. I was still on the phone with her when my son bounded down the steps toward the front door to leave for work.

"I love you, Chris," I said as he turned the doorknob. "I love you too, Dad." That exchange made me feel pretty grateful. I'm passing on this to you. Now it's your turn.

The Cost of Power

Lately I've been thinking about power. More to the point, I have been thinking about its use by leaders and the cost of their using it. For me this week has been a lesson in what happens when leaders sell themselves on the idea that they know best. This story hits close to home. In fact, it is about home.

I live in a neighborhood that is governed by a homeowners association. Mark Twain famously said, "When God decided to make fools, he first practiced by making boards of education." I do not believe it. He first practiced by making homeowner association boards.

Wherever I have lived that has been governed by a HOA, I have gotten myself elected to the board. In part, this has been a self-serving gesture, the result of which has been to protect me and my family from, well, fools. So it is right here, right now. I have proof.

There is an individual (let's call him Jack) who serves with me and three other people on a five-person board where we live in Midtown Raleigh. From his behavior, it would seem that Jack believes he has been elected to rule rather than serve.

Whatever the State of North Carolina has determined is within our jurisdiction, Jack argues that we unilaterally do it. A ten percent increase in homeowners fees, do it. A special assessment, do it. Borrow money, do it.

Jack reasons that by electing us, homeowners empowered the board to do that which is difficult and sometimes against any one homeowner's interest. According to Jack, we serve the greater common good by making decisions without input from homeowners.

Call me naive, but building a consensus, creating ownership, and developing community, although difficult, is exactly what elected officials should be about. Anything short of that is dictatorship, not leadership. The two are easily discriminated from each other. The former leaves in its wake anger and ignorance while the latter illuminates and instructs.

Can elected officials advance an agenda absent the instructive work of leadership? Of course they can. At the first opportunity, however, those whose interests were marginalized seek to right the scales of justice. So the pendulum swings from the dispossessed to the empowered and back again. The cost of power is awfully high.

What's Come Clearer?

Henry David Thoreau often inquired of friends whom he had not seen in awhile, "What's come clearer since last we met?" I think as educators and education supporters, we might do well to propagate the essayist's question. It seems to me that behind the question is an assumption that people are learning. Many things that have come clearer for me this week but I want to relate only one.

A cross-district training event at Wake Education Partnership this week reminded me that we human beings are predictably self-deceptive. As part of VitalSmart's Influencer training, students view a re-enactment of the famous Milgram experiment of the 1960s which, as you may recall, was a study of authority and obedience.

In the video, normally-intelligent adult subjects, playing the role of teacher, were trained by a social scientist at a prestigious university to administer increasingly-intense levels of electrical shock to adult students, depending on their recall accuracy for random word pairs. As experimental confederates, the unseen students in the next room were never actually shocked but led teachers to believe they were through audible howls of pain and an occasional, "I'm done. Let me out of here."

In ninety percent of experimental cases, teachers trained by the scientist continued to deliver shocks even after their students fell silent, ostensibly unconscious--or worse--from the shock. Even though walking away from the experiment was a teacher's option, it was an option rarely exercised.  This was true not only of the bad old 1960s original but also of the 21st century re-enactment.

But people's willingness to inflict pain in the name of science is not my point. Rather it is students' unfailing response to a straight-forward question strategically posed prior to viewing the re-enactment: "Do you believe that within twenty minutes, under fairly normal conditions with no illegal force, you could be induced to torture an innocent stranger to the point of death?" Even in the cloak of anonymity. what do you think was their answer? If you said most people say "no," you would be absolutely right--and dead wrong.

Of thirteen students in the class, only one admitted the possibility that he could be influenced to, oh say, lethally shock an unwilling fellow human being.  I see the disconnect in one of two ways. Either I tend to recruit to my classes the most moral people in the entire world or my students are perfectly ordinary people who believe, against scientifically-validated studies to the contrary, that they are extraordinary. Sorry. I gotta go with science.

I end this cautionary tale with good news: We are sentient beings who may, in fact, chose what to be influenced by. When your mom told you not to hang out with that rough crowd, she was right. You were a good kid but even good kids can delude themselves. The fact is that the graveyards and prisons are full of good kids influenced by bad things.

How much more true that is of us sophisticated adults, walking around free everyday, who can rationalize why we must do the things we do, even when Mom would tell us otherwise. Listen to your mom. Chose your influences. You are only human.