Bringing your smarts to community*

Charles Dickens opened A Tale of Two Cities---that haunting story of both hopelessness and possibility in late 18th century—with these so memorable ideas, put out there in binary opposition:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity ; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope; it was the winter of despair.

And so it is now---this epoch in which you’ve been pursuing excellence in your lives. On the one hand, it’s arguably an epoch of foolishness and a season of darkness and despair. If you focus on the ominous signs, it would be easy to conclude the planet is going through the worst of times---its living fabric is frayed, the climate is overheating faster than the Fox News rhetoric denying it, groundwater is overtapped, rainforests overcut, seas overfished, oil gushing into the Gulf. And there’s more than a little human misery as a consequence. It’s no stretch to say the global political economic system is doing its best sow the seeds of its own destruction. If I were a 21 year-old looking at these trends, I might also be trying to find the nearest noose. For a moment I want you to keep those thoughts at bay. Pretty soon we’ll try to move the conversation to seasons of light and springs of hope.

First, I’ve got to give you a bit of my backstory. After all, we are “fellow initiates,” no longer strangers, right? When you scratch the surface of Ted, you find the son of a street-smart first generation American whose Latvian parents in the south end of Boston gave him a good education that included a love of learning about other places. I absorbed some of my dad’s street-wisdom and global awareness and got help from equally smart citizens who were my high school and college mentors. I was not a top-flight high school student. I wanted to be a baseball player. But I couldn’t hit the curve ball. I got into my share of trouble. But I was good enough to be admitted to Boston University. I never considered Harvard which my dad dropped out of in his junior year. As a Jewish immigrant’s kid, he felt uncomfortable there, to say the least. He never, never encouraged me to think Ivy.

In my senior year of high school, my dad’s business went belly-up. We were in a recession like the one we’re living through now. Pricey universities were out of the question. I lowered my sights and went to a state college on the way to Cape Cod. The nearby beaches appealed to me. Tuition was $100 per semester. Can you imagine? With the family in crisis, I worked my way through that college, far more appreciative, I’m sure, of my undergraduate degree than had my parents paid my way. That college was a small place with no Phi Beta Kappa chapter. I probably would not have qualified. I did do well enough to get admission to graduate school.

At age 25 I found myself sitting with small scale coffee farmers on the eastern slopes of Mount Kenya. They told me of their lives. I was blown away by their acumen and sense of the fates as well as the possible, their overall optimism. From then onward, I have never lost my fascination with the village-level of the human story—how, on the one hand, villagers’ dreams can turn to smoke as national and global systems smudge-out their initiatives. But, on the other, how resilient is this local level of the global system. Through the hardest of times, villagers I’ve known tend to avoid the seasons of despair. So, on my gloomiest days, I think of walking down the path to this imaginary African village I have in my head. I hear the sounds of children playing. I hear other people engaged in lively banter and women singing as they winnow grain. I hear laughter. And though this daydream is hopelessly romantic and reveals none of the hardships, my heart lifts.

Now back to Dickens.

Why would you, as young folk heading into a highly uncertain future take a leap of optimism and say to me: “Hey Ted, what about the other parts of that Dickens quote? These might be the best of times. I might be part of the coming age of wisdom. What I foresee is a season of light, a spring of hope!” And I would say, “absolutely.”

What I’ve been studying recently are communities, mostly not in Africa but here in North America, who are sailing into the future on winds of can-do energy and optimism by doing projects that are tackling pollution, restoring despoiled landscapes, building affordable housing, saving endangered species, boosting local food systems, strengthening local businesses---in spite of hard times, in spite of a grid-locked democracy. By taking the future of the places they call home into their own hands and by shedding ego for community, people in these places are building the kind of resilience I saw on the slopes of Mount Kenya.

So here’s what I think you smart and highly evolved scholars can do---no matter where you are, no matter what else you have to do: you can put aside ego, you can combat passivity and apathy, you can find community, and you can engage in service to make that community better. I know that many of you have already discovered the value of such service. But in the future---say next year---you may think…yeah but, yeah but Ted! I cannot do that in the midst of prepping for MCATs, LSATs, grad apps. And then after that, I can’t do that! I’m in medical school. Ted responds. Yes you can.

Sara Thorp is a friend and heroine of mine here. She is a medical student. She just took her first set of boards last week. She goes on to the clinical years this summer. In her two years of med school, she has made absolutely impressive contributions to her community, which, in her case, is our medical school, her own medical student community, Ohio University, and beyond.

It’s the “beyond” part I want to tell you about. Sara has been participating in an exchange program with Palestinian doctors and students. While in Palestine last summer, she worked in clinics in Palestine and even trained one weekend in a clinic run by the Israeli chapter of Physicians for Human Rights. Think of that! Israeli docs and medical students working in Palestine with human rights as their primary motivation. In a place of despair, here’s authentic hope. She told me a next step might be bringing both Israeli and Palestinian medical students into the mix. As someone who’s been on the ground on both sides of the border, she is confident things can improve. With her work, whatever may come, she’s helped increased the pools of good will and peace.

But my main point here is that if Sara can do this in the midst of one of the most demanding times of her life, and maintain excellent grades, I bet you can. If you want suggestions about how to put aside your own egos for community and thus keep the doors of despair mostly closed, come find me in the year ahead. There are dozens of ways this community can benefit from your dedication and smarts. What I must do, what you must do, is to put our hands to that kind of work. For that is how we can wake up each day and find ourselves in a spring of hope.
* Address to Initiates of Phi Beta Kappa, Lambda Chapter of Ohio, Ohio University, June 11, 2010