Every Little Thing Matters

Nice is the goal

Einstein was born on this date. I noticed for the first time that he was the son of a Jewish electrical engineer. I suspect that relativity had an impact on his career choices.

Also on this day, German Ferdinand von Zeppelin received a US patent for a "Navigable Balloon". 70 years later, someone was strolling on the moon.

Tomorrow is the birthday of Joan Ruth Bader, who graduated at the top of her class at Cornell at age 21. Before she was 22, Ruth Bader Ginsburg would be demoted in her job at the Social Security Administration in Oklahoma for getting pregnant.

Funny what little things do to a life. And other lives.

I recall in community college days as I looked forward to my first vote ever, I bypassed the newspapers and did some basic research into two presidential candidates. One guy grew up as the son of a Methodist minister at the edge of the poverty line during the Great Depression. He went on to become a decorated Army pilot in WW2. When he first reached Italy, he was stationed in a town starving and disease-ridden due to the war. It was worse than anything he’d seen in the US during the Depression.

When Germany was defeated, he’d fly relief missions to numerous places in Europe, returned to the states, went to school and became a history professor. The aggregate of the little things in his life made him favor Dewey over Truman, and in his subsequent political career, he was a champion of farmers and overcoming malnutrition, nationally and globally.

The candidate he ran against for president was raised in a poor Quaker family, worked his way through college before studying law at Duke. He began his law career working on litigation cases for local oil companies and handling wills. He spent a little under 3 years in the Navy directing supply aircraft in the South Pacific. From the time of his first successful campaign in politics in 1946 till the campaign he ran when I was 18, he demonized every candidate he ran against with the same tactic: all of them were Communist sympathizers.

But his Methodist challenger had one principle disadvantage. The Quaker was the incumbent president. Looking at the careers of both while our country was heavily divided by the deadly mistake of the Vietnam War, it seemed a no-brainer to support the guy who wanted to feed the country and restore peace.

Ever since, my love for the little things in history have appealed to me as much as the big. History is critical to understanding it all. In the 48 years since, I’ve seen history completely disregarded with messaging and circus stunts displacing all reason. The ugliest predominates and sound bites - the littlest of things - rule.

I now loath the political profession especially the kind practiced nationally. It can’t ever be fully repaired till we find a way to drain the money out of political campaigns that wield the most influence. Till that day - which hardly seems likely to arrive in the remainder of my lifetime - I have to remind myself often that a healthy minority of the candidates for these positions are well motivated to serve the public well and it’s regularly demonstrated by the little things they do. More than the things being said and reported by the main news outlets.

When I see the words ‘shocking’, ‘shocked’, ‘furious’ and adjectives like that in a headline, I often skip the article because who needs clickbait in this digital age? The headlines are intent on conveying emotion and controversy. WE need more deep investigative journalism research like the people at Pro Publica do and less pulpit posturing like the publishers and editors at the NY Times do. Televised news often does worse with lots of sound and fury signifying something maybe, but often, not enough.

I’m not well suited to gain much from Twitter. Amid of a lot of noise and fuzz, it grants me an early look at breaking news and some funny punchlines. I gain far more in this thing we call life by planting seeds and watching/assisting their growth. Ideas, innovations, creations of beauty or kindness and kids are examples of the importance of seeds requiring our greatest nurturings.

Facebook grants room for more thorough discussions, but with its large networking base, it can overwhelm our desire to learn more from people we’ve come to admire and respect and feel warm kinship with. There’s often far too little time to ingest and digest topical events, while trying to remain aware of the minutiae in the lives of many people. Friends and blood relations can easily get lost for weeks and months amid the algorithmic push that appears in our Notifications feeds and comments.

Attention Deficit Disorder happens. Figuring out how to prioritize intake and outreach, feeding our souls and others is wholistic yet difficult to do on the regular. The need for that healthy balance continues to grow.

I intend to shed some sources of information and compartmentalize more to obtain that balance. I find I get a good well-rounded array of national information from WaPo/McClatchy/ProPublica. I get a good sense of what numerous regions in the country share via USAToday. Bolstered by reading about a dozen blogs and a few zines, I get exposed to a good range of opinion from different perspectives.

Other than a couple of columnists I enjoy - like Charles Blow - or some months long investigation they print, I don’t find much that gains me anything in the NYTimes. I mean, I’ll check out certain items like I do at the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Dallas Morning News or the Miami Herald, but I get too little from a thorough daily NY Times read to justify it any more. I’ve seen them do better. Those days are past.

Time on Facebook is more enjoyably spent as the bench outside the general store. Chatting, gossiping, joshing around, touching the base of each other’s lives - especially during a pandemic lockdown - but also as an offset to what happens for many in retirement years, differing degrees of social isolation.

But I’m not very happy helping a corporation like FB with its massive influence on the body politic and the public discourse - its repetitive bowing to the addictions of greed and celebrity worship really creates a severe distortion in the Short Life/Kind Values Continuum. A visit with a nearby friend, a phone call from people in the family or adopted community feels far more enriching for me.

And of course I know some people who find it more comfortable to text or type, for multiple reasons.

There’s just more refining and defining to do with this older newsletter medium. Spring and real gardening are just around the corner. I have most of the winter weeding done here. I have to build some raised garden beds next door, its contents to be shared with the other duplex resident. There’s more to do at my taxi-driving friend’s house a few miles away while she recovers from major surgery. Her husband works the graveyard shift, sleeps through much of the day, so this grants her some balance and a crop of fresh vegetables by late May and beyond.

I definitely yearn for a time when I can disengage from the political world more. I know there’s always gonna be something there but when it’s clear a quarter of the country seems happily bent on doing physical harm to each other… well, that’s what really needs to get out and go the hell away.

One especially close long-term friend, a guy I love and deeply respect, requires more attention. He drove taxi in Alaska, among a few other early jobs, tried to become a police officer but didn’t fit their psychological tests - too calm and deliberative and intelligent for their action plan, I guess. So he spent much of his twin careers working with and for mental health patients and being a single Dad. In retirement, he joined the Peace Corps, providing information and guidance about HIV and AIDS in parts of South Africa. He found the work and the people he met very rewarding but had to return a few years ago with the onset of Parkinson’s Disease. He’s still pretty young at 65 now.

I met him about 31 years ago. In the midst of a major homeless crisis, we’d show up at demonstrations, meetings of city and county officials or advocacy groups. I was writing part time for a weekly paper and he was always great with his Letters to the Editor at numerous publications. And we both had daughters.

Recently, he’s developed a new and difficult complication that will - for awhile - require extra management and direction to restore balance to his life. I feel very confident he’ll get past it and resume all the community activities important to him, most of them about community health issues, from AIDS to autism, brains and bodies. I don’t recall very many people so beneficial to a community as this guy has always been.

There’s his daughter and grandkids and friends and a growing circle of loved ones who aren’t sufficiently satiated with his heart’s givings yet. Give him a booyah! a howdy, a prayer, some good country music or a funny meme. The soul is a seed requiring nourishment too. His name is Gary.

Every little thing you do matters. You can disseminate hatred, destruction, fear and dishonesty. The harvests can’t sustain you.

Speak up more. He needs more balance from the little love things. I think we all do.

82 years ago today, Czechoslovakia was dissolved with Nazi Germany set to take over. 47 years ago, Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams took multiple bullet wounds when his car was attacked in Belfast. And twenty years ago in England on March 17, the world’s largest greenhouse, the Eden Project, fully opened to the public.

From little things you do today, amazing things can grow. Today would you give a thought to Gary?

These videos are for Gary, too.

Gary loves a good country tune now and then.

For Gary, and anyone else who needs their seed nourished some today too.

Get that little thing going ‘cause it matters.