So in this week’s letter, I wanted to focus on inspiration and understanding. Let’s start with a summary of a moving story from Small Deeds Done:
—
Irena Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker when Germany invaded Poland and made aiding and hiding Jewish families a capital offense. At a little over (or under, depending upon your source) five feet tall, she was described as bossy and independent, and possessing a strong will to protect the most vulnerable among us.
And so, notwithstanding the personal risk, she became active in the Polish underground movement Zegota. She used her status as a social worker to gain access to the Warsaw Ghetto, where over 400,000 Jews were forced to live within 16 city blocks.
She described the scenes that she saw there as hell on earth. And, eventually, knowing that many of the families in the ghetto would be sent to their deaths, she began an effort that’s both heroic and heartbreaking.
She started smuggling the children.
I’ve been thinking a lot about desperation and how it can often inspire people to go well beyond what is normally expected of them because they have no choice. This story immediately reflects that there is some truth to this thought and that conversely, comfort kills.
She and her network of young women would hide them in gurneys, in carts, in doctor’s bags, in suitcases and caskets – whatever a child could fit within or under without being detected. She even used the floorboards of cars for the smallest of babies, giving them what she called “sleeping powder” to keep them quiet. She trained her dog to bark continuously on her command to drown out the wailing.
But one by one, and door by door, she convinced terrified, anguished parents to hand over their most precious thing – their child – for the chance of survival. She later described the mothers that gave her their children as being far more heroic than she. “You shouldn’t trust me,” she would say. “But what choice do you have?”
She never forgot the look in those mothers’ eyes.
Imagining this is nearly impossible for me. I hope I will never understand it.
…
She was sentenced to death, but her life was spared when a greedy guard took the reward that her Zegota colleagues offered. Her would-be executioner dumped her in the woods to be found and nursed back to health. After the war was over, she dug up that precious jar and began the work of reuniting the families. Most of her attempts failed because the parents had perished in concentration camps.
But the children – 2500 in all – lived on.
Twenty-five hundred children were saved by a social worker and a small group of young women who could not stay silent when confronted with the atrocities they were seeing unfold before their eyes. It’s estimated that she personally rescued 400 children.
She wasn’t a soldier. She wasn’t trained as an organizer. She certainly had no experience smuggling children.
She wasn’t perfect.
But she was passionate, insistent, and determined.
And she knew that she could make a difference.
Sometimes the world puts you down, sometimes you don’t accomplish what you wanted to accomplish, and sometimes you make a mistake… But our legacy, it’s all about what we intend to do and our overall trajectory of impact. Let’s make sure we’re headed in the right direction and with the right goal in mind.
Judgment
I currently drive a Silver 2010 Grand Caravan and maybe put on an average of 25 miles a month on it through all of 2020. There's a lot of reasons for this but I'll list the top 3:
I was in a rollover accident in late 2019. I didn't get hurt at all. I didn't hurt anyone else. No one else was even involved. But if I am being honest, I'm pretty fucked up in the head about it.
A pandemic took away most of my incentives to get out of the house.
The government and the medical community insisted on avoiding unnecessary exposure to other people and their germs. So far I'm listening to them as best as I can.
When I do drive around town to get my monthly groceries or a rare takeout meal, I often see a truck with MAGA (Make America Great Again), people out and about refusing to wear masks, and great congregations of people in confined spaces.
The rural Upper Peninsula of Michigan has not really felt the significance of the pandemic in a health sense. Instead, they've felt the global response of the pandemic in an economic sense. This separation has led to an extremely unique breakdown of demographics that I still have a hard time understanding.
In a nutshell, our society is more divided than ever in terms of the worldview that each individual might possess, the problems they're facing, and the solutions that matter to them. This divide has many significant costs to society from prolonged human suffering, the rising influence of populism on American politics, the shifting political spectrum of our representative parties, and the attention deficiency of rural and urban environments.
The result of all of this is judgment.
I defaulted to judging these people and their seemingly selfish and idiotic behavior. But did I really deserve to judge them? Did I know the full story? How much of what I observed was the rule versus the exception?
—
It was just past 7:00 AM CST on a wet and snowy Monday in December 2019. I'm driving my newest used vehicle that I just purchased a week prior because I hit a deer with my beloved 2008 Cadillac DeVille. The SUV handled very differently than my former boat of a car Cadillac. I wasn't used to it. My first mistake was driving my new Buick SUV as if it was a Cadillac DeVille.
I always operated on this simple mentality that if you're not early, you're late. Things had already gone wrong that morning. I can't remember what exactly but I very rarely let myself run so late behind my own personal schedule, so I had this mental push to get to work as fast as possible. This was obviously a mental error in my own head prioritizing being significantly early to work like usual instead of being extra safe on the roadways. My second mistake was ignoring the safety orientation I was once proud of when I was a teen just learning how to drive.
I had driven this route for over a year, driving 75 miles from my home in Rapid River to my work in Iron Mountain then 75 miles back. That's 150 miles a day, 5 days a week, for a year equalling approximately 40,000 miles total. Driving the same route that often gave me a certain sense of confidence that should never have blossomed in my head. Driving is the most dangerous thing most Americans can do on a daily basis. My third mistake was getting comfortable with this extremely dangerous activity.
I get to the start of a long, clear stretch of road and feel brave enough to step up my speed a little, and that's when I hit a patch of black ice. I lose control of the SUV almost immediately and panic. I slam on the brakes and significantly turn my vehicle as if that would right my course. It didn't. I swerve into the other lane, swerve back into my lane, and slam into the snowbank on my side of the road.
When an immovable object meets an unstoppable force, the resulting reaction is potentially catastrophic. This was where my car started to roll over. It tumbled down from the highway into the ditch with two and a half rotations. I remained conscious the entire time and let me tell you it was the scariest fucking experience of my life.
My life did not flash before my eyes though.
As the car finally planted itself in the bottom of the ditch, I ended up with my driver's side door on the ground (which was full of snow) and snow was falling in from most of my other windows. I was stuck with my buckle in place. I couldn't find my phone. I couldn't find my glasses. I was panicking about being late for work. My car was still running. I shut it off.
I realized I needed to think things through. Panicking wasn't going to help me. I needed to find out if I was hurt, I needed to get ahold of law enforcement, and I needed to figure out if I was in any more danger. I started feeling around my body for wounds and regularly checking my hands for signs of blood. Multiple passersby were now trudging through the deep packed snow in jeans and tennis shoes to see if I was okay.
At this point, it gets mundane. I am rescued within the hour and given a clean bill of health. Now I had to deal with insurance, missing days or weeks of work, and figure out if I was going to move up to Iron Mountain or buy yet another vehicle.
I don’t think I deserve to be judged by this one error alone, but it happened, and its existence will shape me until the end of time.
This is how we will have to treat the people on both sides of our current events because we cannot continue in the black/white and red/blue forever.
Dial It Up
I’ve always hated numbers. Math wasn’t a strong suit for me. So I love this video:
But maybe I love this video because I hated math, and this feeds my inherent bias by validating my hatred for math.
Anyway, the West Wing hits different during this current era of chaos we all find ourselves living in. I’ve been binge-watching it for the last couple of weeks now. I have a lot of thoughts. I’ll be sharing them in the weeks to come.
Today’s Thought: Interpretation
The thing about this clip that I really love is that it explores how humans interpret the measures and metrics that we collect. Numbers lie is just another way of explaining that we don’t understand what we're being told.
Josh Lyman cares about these numbers in a way that has already cemented him to his beliefs. How we map the world is how we see the world.
One Final Thing
I debated with myself if I should do a normal letter last week or not, it caused some delay.
In the end, I decided to say something outside of the format I’ve gotten used to.
It’s my first (and hopefully only) Not My Normal Letter.