You Are Good

A little reminder about the light you bring to the world.

You Are Good.

So now we know how it happens.

How millions of people “stand by” and watch as a country’s entanglement with hate, violence, control, technology, money, discipline, punishment, and self-aggrandizing evolves into a regime.

They went to their workplaces. They bought groceries. They worried and complained and wrote in opposition. They celebrated loved ones’ birthdays. They hugged their friends. They made love. They cooked dinner.

They walked in the woods.

Meditated.

Prayed.

Jimmy Carter became the Governor of Georgia in 1971, the same year I was born in Ohio. He later became President of the United States and the first President I remember as a child.

My third grade music teacher saw to that. She taught us an unforgettable tune that had us singing every single President’s last name, in order of their presidency, from Washington to the then-President Carter.

We sang with the kind of enthusiasm and joy one has a hard time finding outside of a third grade music class.

At least I did. I sang louder and prouder in that classroom than anywhere I had up to that point in my life. Belting out Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” also comes to mind as a highlight of my singing performances. Imagine leaving a fun group of friends and making the late-night winter drive home with snow spitting against the dark sky in your late teens and early twenties.

Sublime.

I have added every single President’s name to that song since third grade, extending it one-by-one with a tune that no longer resembles the original.

Reagan, Bush.

Clinton, Bush.

Obama (Ojoya Obama).

trump,

Biden.

You know what they are.

We almost added a woman in there, not once but twice.

That would have been something, wouldn’t it? To live in a time when the United States elected a woman President? We are so brainwashed to believe this country is the BEST THERE IS, but in the end, it’s just a country, and we just live here, and the idea of a Nation-State is still quite young and immature like us.

It’s hard to face those facts sometimes.

Betty Stritt was my fourth grade teacher, the final year of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, and she was mesmerizing.

Tall – way taller than any woman I knew before her – with tight curly gray hair that bounced just a bit when she taught us to clog to songs like “Rocky Top.”

Power. All power.

She told me I was a writer and I believed her.

Even when many, many teachers later in my life told me writing was just a school subject to be perfected with carefully edited spelling, punctuation, grammar, and the like, I held onto those words from Mrs. Stritt.

I was a writer.

She, like my third grade teacher, was teaching in a rural community in Ohio where I lived some of the best years of my childhood. This was, no doubt, shaped by the social and political landscape of our lives: we were at the tail-end of the Wins of the Civil Rights Movement, in the heyday of progressive education in the U.S. with open classrooms and the arts proliferating, the last generation of children to be born prior to the introduction of “the pill” for hormonal birth control, and three or four television channels on the one screen in the home.

This also means my elementary school teachers were working during a time/space of social and political openness, an explosion of feminist thought, a moment of great hope and creativity. Many of them incorporated the arts into the curriculum as just an everyday habit. I have memories of creating things all the time: artwork, plays, songs, card games, dances, board games, books, stories, inventions, our very own computer games.

I have written about my early years a lot (for example, check out my first book Girls, Social Class, and Literacy and also this fabulous piece I created with James F. Woglom called “Girlhood Deconstructed” that is also a chapter in our book On Mutant Pedagogies: Seeking Justice and Drawing Change in Teacher Education).

At some point in my middle and high school years, I learned about the Holocaust. The images and ideas were confusing and disorienting.

How could people do that, I wondered.

Why didn’t anyone stop them, I raged.

Never Again was a slogan I have seen or heard for most of my life. Of course as a young adult I learned that state-sponsored hate, violence, control, and genocide didn’t go away with the end of World War II, and the United States wasn’t the end-all-be-all that I was led to believe as a child putting my right hand over my heart and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every morning at school.

And I was there every morning, too. I earned numerous Perfect Attendance Awards before High School when my attendance was – well – not very consistent at all, but that’s another story.

I recited the Pledge of Allegiance a lot in my life. No one ever had a conversation with me about what, exactly, my pledge meant. It was rote. Routine. Disciplined. Indoctrination.

By the way, a sweet young child in my family showed off her ability to “say the pledge,” one day when she was six years old and we were hiking in the woods. The sun was shining through the canopy, her face was almost unrecognizable with the light shining on her, and she placed her hand on her heart and said:

I pledge allegiance

To the flag

Of the United States

After America.

Into the republic,

Under Gos,

With Liberty Mutual

After All.

It seems a bit prescient now.

My husband’s Great Uncle, who is still living, immigrated from Germany to the U.S. as a teenager. He had been part of Hitler’s Youth.

He didn’t have a choice.

He was youth.

Hitler was in charge.

He married a young woman who had recently immigrated from the Philippines. Her family had been terrorized by the Japanese Army who invaded their country of thousands of islands as an attack on the United States and an attempt to take control of the islands that had been colonized by the U.S. after Spain ceded the islands following their defeat in 1898. The people of the Philippines didn’t want to be under colonial rule and they fought U.S. colonization for several years, eventually losing that fight and tens and hundreds of thousands of lives. The islands are “strategically located” near “natural resources” like oil, and provide a potential “national security” location for countries that are always thinking about defending themselves from invasion or colonizing other lands. Japan didn’t want the U.S. to have such a strategic location in the Pacific, so they used their military might and initiated war.

That young woman’s family, including my husband’s grandmother (whom we all affectionately call Grammy), hid in the mountains, lost their father to war, and fended off hunger by eating a lot of beans given to them by a kind bean-farming family. Grammy, at first, was happy about the invasion because they no longer had to go to school.

Of course, she quickly realized that she would rather be in school than in war.

Grammy knows what it’s like to live under a dictatorship and to live war.

So does that special Great Uncle who has told us precious few stories over the years when we were lucky enough to be together.

They love America. It’s a land free of dictatorships and home-based war.

At least it has been since they moved here as teenagers.

Jimmy Carter, I learned when I was much older, was a President for Peace. He was a good man, as people like to say about down-to-earth and kind men.

I’m making a mental note right now to notice how people use this phrase, “a good man.” I like saying things like, “that is a beautiful human right there” myself, but I’m also okay with people pointing out the good in any way they can.

Jimmy Carter lived to be 100 years old.

That just made me think about those adorable activities so many elementary teachers do with their students on the 100^th day of school each year. I hope they all hold up pictures of Jimmy Carter on the 100^th day of school and teach about all the good he and Rosalynn Carter were doing well into their 80s and 90s.

If I can be and do good, I want to live to 100 years too.

There is something about being in the light of a good human. The goodness is contagious.

I want to be good too, it makes us think and feel.

I have spent 30 years as an educator, working with children as young as four years old and grown-ups as old as 70 and beyond. It never ceases to amaze me how many people don’t believe they are good.

You are good. Yes, you.

Just two weeks ago I looked a beautiful young teacher in the eye who was clearly judging herself much more harshly than anyone else would (or should) and said, “you are good, you are doing good,” and she burst into tears.

You should see the way a seven-year-old child lights up from the inside when they hear – for the first time – they are good.

They beam, let me tell you, they beam.

And you should see the way an eighteen-year-old newly minted adult shines when I smile at them and say you are good. In fact, you are beautiful and bright and powerful and very very good.

Have you ever tried that with someone you live with?

Yes, I’m going to go there, right where it’s sometimes the hardest to be gentle and compassionate and giving and – well – good.

Let’s say your partner is stressed out, anxious, pretty irritable and really pushing your buttons.

I know, right? It can be hard to be soft in those moments.

When someone is not being or doing or beaming “good,” at us, we sometimes want to say “You’re bad, you’re awful, this is awful! Stop!”

Then the spiraling and consolidating and expanding of not-goodness starts to take hold.

So instead, you take a breath.

Smile.

Look at your partner – or friend or roommate or mother or cousin – and say, “you are good, you are doing good.”

See what I mean? I want to cry right now, just thinking about how it would feel if someone said that to me when I was cracking under pressure.

Yes please, please remind me that I am good.

So now we know how it happens. It’s not that everyone agreed, or everyone was horrible and hateful and awful, or that everyone even was aware of or recognized what was happening.

Good humans everywhere were - and are - doing what they can to shine more goodness into the world.

Sometimes these are tiny, powerful things like sharing a recipe with someone. Smiling at a stranger. Giving a blanket or food money to someone who is unhoused. Helping with a ride. Writing a letter to help someone get an apartment or a job or a potential visa. Playing with a dog. Laughing out loud. Sitting quietly in the woods filled with gratitude. Calling a friend to say hi. Making someone coffee. Buying a book from an independent bookstore or an online bookstore that does good. Cleaning up a mess that you didn’t make. Saying thank you. Offering a cutting from a plant. Sharing food. Making and giving art. Playing a game with a child. Putting down your phone.

Sometimes these are “bigger” things.

I really hesitate to use the word big or bigger here. There is nothing bigger than being good in our everyday mundane lives. What I think I mean here is that sometimes we do things that are aimed directly at changing structures – a “louder” form of goodness.

Sometimes you organize events that bring people together in community. Or you knock on doors and ask people to consider who they’re voting for. You pass out information about where to go for help if you need money or housing or abortion care or food or immigration support or legal help or mental health support. You lobby government officials to change a law. You organize in your workplace for better working conditions. You set up a co-op childcare or eldercare situation that will change so many people’s lives for the better. You work with children or teenagers or young adults or middle-aged adults, or senior adults to do something cool and fun and,

Well,

Good.

Our intentions and our efforts don’t mean we have control over any outcome, but they still matter to the beings and places that feel our light.

Pema Chödrön, in Welcoming the Unwelcome: Wholehearted Living in a Brokenhearted World writes about goodness:

“When more of us learn to trust our basic goodness, society will be stronger. This doesn’t mean there won’t be hard times. It doesn’t mean violence, injustice, and poverty will end. It doesn’t mean the polar icecaps won’t melt and the water in the oceans won’t rise. But it does mean that there will be a lot of resilient people who will never give up on humanity and will always be around to help others. It does mean that when things get rough, it will bring out the best in people, rather than the worst. If we learn how not to lose heart, we will always find ways to make important contributions to our world.”

If you have made it this far, hello friend.

Has anyone told you lately that you are good?

I’m here to remind you that today and every day,

You. Are. Good.