It was September 1998, in Bloomington, Indiana. As part of a conference on “Spirituality and Ecology: No Separation,” a group of concerned citizens were gathered in the basement of Saint Paul Catholic Center. They were talking about living their ideals. Some had planted trees in Africa. Some described ways that they honor the indigenous spirit of a place, and their own ancestors. Elderly nuns and young feminists recounted their part in the women’s struggle. One frustrated woman voiced the nagging worry of many. “I want to do something, but what can I do? I’m just one person, an average person. I can’t have an impact. The world is so screwed up, and I have so little power. I feel so paralyzed.”
I practically exploded.
Years before I had been stricken by a debilitating illness. Perilymph fistula’s symptoms are like those of multiple sclerosis. On some days I was functional. On others — and I could never predict when these days would strike — I was literally paralyzed. I couldn’t leave the house; I could barely stand up.
I had moved to Bloomington for graduate school. I knew no one in town. I couldn’t get healthcare because I hadn’t enough money, and the Social Security Administration, against the advice of its own physician and vocational advisors, had denied my claim.
That’s why, when the conference participant claimed that just one person, one average person, can’t do anything significant to make the world a better place, I raised my hand and spoke. “I have an illness that causes intermittent bouts of paralysis,” I explained. “And that paralysis has taught me something. It has taught me that my protestations of my own powerlessness are bogus. Yes, some days I can’t move or see. But you know what? Some days I can move. Some days I can see. And the difference between being able to walk across the room and not being able to walk across the room is epic.”
I told them how I commuted to campus by foot along a railroad track. In spring I came across turtles who had gotten stuck. The track was littered with the hollowing shells of turtles that hadn’t been able to escape the rails. So I bent over, and I picked up the still-living trapped turtles that I did find. I carried them to a wooded area and let them go. I had that much power. For those turtles, it was enough.
“I’m just like those turtles,” I said. “When I have been sick and housebound for days, I wish someone — anyone — would talk to me. To hear a human voice say my name; to be touched: that would mean the world to me.”
I told the group a story: One day an attack hit me while I was walking home from campus. It was a snowy day. There was snow on the ground, and more snow was falling from the sky. I struggled with each step, wobbled and wove across the road. I must have looked like a drunk. One of my neighbors, whom I had never met, stopped and asked if I was OK. He drove me home.
He didn’t hand me the thousands of dollars I needed for surgery. He didn’t take me in and empty my puke bucket. He just gave me one ride, one day. I am still grateful to him and touched by his gesture.
“I’ve lived in the neighborhood for years,” I said, “and so far he has been the only one to stop. The problem is not that we have so little power. The problem is that we don’t use the power that we have.”
Why do we deny that power? Why do we not honor what we can do?
Part of the reason is that virtue is often defined as something exclusive, like a Porsche or a perfect figure, to which only the rich and famous have access. I remember when the Dalai Lama came to Bloomington in 1999. The words virtue and celebrity became synonymous. Suddenly even our barbershop scuttlebutt featured more movie stars than an article from People magazine. “Did you see Steven Seagal on Kirkwood Avenue? Richard Gere gets in tomorrow.” Virtue becomes something farther and farther out of the reach of the common person.
I was once a Peace Corps volunteer. I also volunteered for the Sisters of Charity, the order begun by Mother Teresa. When people learn of this, they sometimes act impressed. I am understood to be a virtuous person.
I did go far away, and I did wear foreign garb. But I don’t know that I was virtuous. I tried to be, but I was an immature, inadequately trained girl in foreign countries with obscenely unjust regimes and few avenues for progress. My impact was limited.
To put myself through college, I worked as a nurse’s aide. I earned minimum wage. I wore a pink polyester uniform and dealt with the elderly and the dying, people who went years without seeing a loved one, who died alone. When I speak of this job, I never impress anyone. I am not understood to be a virtuous person. Rather, I am understood to be working-class.
I loved this difficult, low-paid work, but not out of any masochistic sense of personal elevation through suffering. I loved it because I physically and emotionally touched people every day, all day long: I made them comfortable; I made them laugh; I challenged them; they rose to meet the challenges. In return, patients shared with me the most precious commodity: their humanity.
This is not a protest against selfishness, which, well done, can be beautiful. There is nothing I envy, and appreciate, so much as a life led with genuinely unconscious, uncomplicated self-absorption. It’s a sort of karmic performance art. Isn’t that why some people so love observing cats? And I do not begrudge anyone’s enthusiasm for glamour; there’s nothing I like more. The right dress worn by the right starlet on Oscar night probably does as much to feed the soul as a perfect haiku.
Rather, I’m protesting the fallacy that to be virtuous one must be on TV, or one must be off to a meeting on how to be a better person, or one must have just come from a meeting on how to be a better person (while passing up every opportunity to actually be a better person).
It’s sad how “virtue celebrities” sometimes intimidate us with their virtue résumés. We think, Gee, I’ll never travel to Malaysia and close a sweatshop; I’m not brave enough (or organized enough, or articulate enough) to champion a cause. I have to go to work every day, and I just don’t have the time or the gifts to be a virtuous person.
I go to a food bank every two weeks to get my food. I have no car. I can’t carry two weeks’ worth of food the three miles back to my house. Every week I get a ride home from other food-bank patrons. These folks don’t pause for a second to sigh, “Oh, problems are so big, and I’m so powerless; will it really help anything if I give you this ride?” They don’t look around to make sure someone is watching. They just, invisibly, do the right thing. I get rides in old, old cars. In one car I could see the road whiz past under broken-down flooring; in another I shared space with a large, lapping dog. I once got a ride from a man who told me he’d just gotten out of jail. When I was sick, I went from agency to agency, begging people with lofty titles and impressive virtue résumés for help. Most did nothing.
The Lamed-Vav Tzaddikim are the thirty-six hidden saints of Jewish folklore. Unlettered and insignificant, they work at humble trades and pass unnoticed. Because of these anonymous saints, the world continues to exist. Without their insignificant, unnoticed virtue — poof! — God would lose divine patience, and the world would go up in smoke.
Sometimes we convince ourselves that the unnoticed gestures of “insignificant” people mean nothing. It’s not enough to recycle our soda cans; we must Stop Global Warming Now. Since we can’t Stop Global Warming Now, we may as well not recycle our soda cans. It’s not enough to be our best selves; we have to be Gandhi. And yet when we study the biographies of our heroes, we learn that they spent years in preparation, doing tiny, decent things before one historic moment propelled them to center stage and used them to tilt empires.
Ironically, saints we worship today, heroes we admire, were often ridiculed, tortured, or, most punishingly, ignored in their own lifetimes. Saint John of the Cross gave the world the spiritual classic The Dark Night of the Soul. It was inspired by his experience of being imprisoned by the members of his own religious order. Before the birth of Poland’s Solidarity movement, Lech Walesa, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who helped bring down communism, was a nonentity: a blue-collar worker in an oft-ridiculed Eastern European backwater. But he was always active; one moment changed this man’s otherwise small-time, invisible activism into the kind of wedge that can topple a giant. Now, that moment past, Walesa has returned to relative obscurity.
While working or traveling in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe, I occasionally met people who had next to nothing, but who stunned me with the abundance of their humanity. One afternoon, as I trekked to my teaching post in the Himalayas, a monsoon storm turned day into night, and a landslide wiped out my trail. I got terribly lost; coming to a strange village, exhausted, I sat on the porch of a peasant home. I peeked in through the open door and saw the family eating roasted cow-corn kernels for dinner. Roasted cow-corn kernels were to be their entire dinner; there was nothing else on their plates.
A man inside saw that someone was sitting on his porch. He couldn’t have seen that I was American, or anything else about me, for that matter. It was night by then, in a village without electricity. He whispered to his wife, “Someone is sitting on our porch. We have to cook rice.” Rice is the highest-status food in that economy. And by “rice” they meant an elaborate meal consisting of rice, lentils, and vegetables.
The feeling of being seen, the conviction that every act one performs matters to a supremely consequential audience, can come from a belief in God. Psalm 139 articulates how thoroughly and consequentially witnessed the theist feels:
O Lord, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. . . . Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O Lord. . . . Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
The very marrow of the believer’s bones is saturated with the conviction that everything he does is avidly witnessed by God, and that everything he does matters to God. Whether or not one’s fellow incarnate beings see his action is secondary.
Nontheists can also have this feeling that one is witnessed, that everything one does matters. Not just a personalized God sees and tallies human action. Disembodied forces that can never be tampered with also weigh our deeds. For some, karma plays witness. You may be able to fool your fellow humans, but, ultimately, you can’t cheat karma.
In many cultures, there is a disembodied force that demands that every action be ethical: honor. “God, Honor, Country” is the Polish national motto. My stays in Poland introduced me to empty-handed activists who faced off against Nazis, Communists, and now capitalists, with relentless personal power. Burnout and apathy were not in their vocabulary. Even when serving time in prisons that appeared on no map, they felt visible. Honor recorded their every deed and ensured that it mattered.
I suspect that we all have our three-in-the-morning moments when life seems a no-exit film noir, where any effort is pointless, where any hope seems born only to be dashed, like a fallen nestling on a summer sidewalk. When I have these moments, if I do nothing else, I remind myself: the ride in the snow; the volunteers at the food bank; the Nepali peasants who fed me. I remind myself of activists like the Pole Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, who, decades before he would earn any fame, got out of Auschwitz only to go on to even more resistance against the Nazis, and then the Soviets. I remind myself of all the invisible, silent people who, day by day, choice by choice, unseen by me, unknown to me, force me to witness myself, invite me to keep making my own best choices, and keep me living my ideals.
“Political Paralysis” is from the new anthology The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear (Basic Books), edited by Paul Rogat Loeb. (www.theimpossible.org.)
— Ed.
