Be The Change You Want To See

                                                

            Do you want to make a difference in the world? Do you want to see some real change in the way the world is, and how your community functions?

            “Be the change you want to see in the world.” (Mahatma Gandhi)

            “Volunteers are the only human beings on the face of the earth who reflect the nation’s compassion, unselfish caring, patience and just plain loving each other.” (Erma Bombeck)

            Do you want to live in a better neighborhood, a better community? Do you think the world could be a better place? Are you tired of hearing about the troubles of the world and all the negative political rhetoric?  Are you frustrated that things are getting worse, and there’s nothing you can do that would make a difference?

            Then, get involved and volunteer.  Connect with a person, help them out, and make a difference.  Take a few minutes, an hour, maybe a day, and offer your talent.  Pay attention to someone, work together on a project, or simply have a conversation and offer a kind ear, a helping hand. 

            Find a group where you can get involved.  Or do something on your own.

It can start with just a simple conversation at the grocery store or with a neighbor, a few kind words, and maybe a helping hand. 

Volunteers are at the center of our community life.

Our schools, churches, community festivals and gatherings, museums and parks are staffed by volunteers. Much of what happens around here would quickly fade away without dedicated volunteers.

            On a more personal level, our volunteers are helping an elderly neighbor with their yard work, or bringing them a meal.  Others tutor a child, or help out at school or church.  The possibilities are endless.

            Our community calendar in the local paper is filled with activities run by volunteers, working to make this community a better place to live.

            I see the impact of volunteerism everywhere.  Without them, our welcome mat wouldn’t be as inviting, and as enjoyable for our visitors.  Our youth and our seniors wouldn’t be as integrated into our social fabric. Our community wouldn’t be nearly as vibrant and supportive. 

            Look around you.  Volunteers make a difference, and they change lives. 

            I volunteer.  I find a project, I connect with a person, and pay attention to them, and put action into my caring for their wellbeing.  I make a difference and my heart is filled with a sense of purpose, a sense of accomplishment. My volunteer work at the local youth prison and with master gardeners gives me a sense of purpose, and helps change people’s lives for the better.

            In volunteering, I become an instrument of change.  I am part of the solution to a small part of the world’s problems, rather than a person who just sits back and complains. I have a purpose, and become a voice for doing good.

The payback for me is amazing.  What I give I receive back tenfold.  I feel better about myself, I contribute, I connect, and I become a better member of my community. 

            Volunteerism is all about health, my health, the community’s, my state, my nation, and the world. 

I can even stand to watch the evening news, and know that I don’t need to just listen to the litany of the world’s problems and get caught up in all drama. I’m not the passive listener, who can easily say the world is a miserable, hopeless place. Instead, I am part of the answer, an agent of positive change. 

---Neal Lemery, July 26, 2016

We Are All Immigrants

                                                We Are All Immigrants

            We all came from somewhere else.  Maybe not in this generation, but somewhere in the not too distant past, we came from somewhere else.

            This week, my country celebrated its political beginnings, a time of rebellion and war, a time of rising up against an imperial, oppressive power, and going ahead on our own.

            America was a different place in 1776, thirteen separate colonies. Slavery was an accepted economic reality, and times were hard.  Only white men who owned property could vote, and earning a living meant hard physical labor and going without much of what we would think are necessities.

            Back then, we welcomed immigrants: new blood, new energies, new ideas.  We needed more farmers, more merchants, more people in the cultural melting pot we have come to know as America.  And, the America today is a result of all of those waves of immigrants, and the optimism and challenges that brought our ancestors here for a new beginning. 

            On our nation’s birthday, just before my neighbors decided to shoot off their fireworks at dusk, a photo showed up on my phone.  My friend had landed at an American airport, and he had just passed through immigration and customs.

            The photo told the story: his face ablaze with the biggest smile. He held a paper stamped with the date, and the words “inspected”.  It was official.  He was now a documented resident of the USA, a big step to becoming a citizen.

            Becoming a citizen in this country now is a challenging, difficult journey, far different than when my dad made the trip to the local courthouse, filled out a form, and quickly became “legalized”, a citizen.

            My friend’s journey is longer, more convoluted.  It involves a lot of expensive paperwork, and a flight to another country and back again.  And, he’s only halfway done with the process, even though he came here when he was seven years old.

            Now, years later, he’s a college student, and has a career, a marriage. He is finding his way, focused on a profession, giving back to his community, showing his younger siblings they, too, can live the American dream.

            His story is my family’s story, too.  This anniversary day of independence, of throwing off the oppression of an unjust government, the shackles of poverty and hopelessness, of coming to a new land and being able to work hard and make a new, better life for yourself and your family, is the American story. 

It is my story, and now, it is my young friend’s story.

            Some of my ancestors left the sweatshops of an English woolen mill, becoming farmers in their new land, working as farm laborers on an unforgiving Iowa farm in the Midwestern heat.  They became citizens, raising a new generation of farmers, Americans.

They took the Oregon Trail, finding a new land, and their own farm, becoming homesteaders, new Oregonians.  As a child, I heard my grandmother tell the stories of carving out a farm in the forest, a winter spent in a leaky shack with a canvas roof.  The next summer, they built a cabin and a barn, herding their new cows for a week through the forest to their new farm.

After the barn and the cabin, they built a school, taking their hard earned money to hire a teacher and educate their kids. Those immigrants, those refugees from an English woolen mill, they built a new life in a new world.

            My grandfather came here, too, yet another immigrant, fresh from a prisoner of war camp after the First World War.  There was nothing for him where he had come from, except poverty and disease.  Coming to American offered hope, opportunity, a new beginning. He, too, worked as a farm laborer, learning English after a long day, taking the steps to become a citizen. 

            On the other side of the family, there are other stories, of pulling up stakes and moving to a new land, the promise of education, the value of hard work and adjusting to challenges, the possibilities that came with America’s promise. 

            Looking back, I see that all my family were immigrants.  Coming to America, making your life better, working hard, it was who we were, and who we are. 

            Looking around, I see that my town was built by the sweat and commitment of immigrants, newcomers who didn’t take opportunities for granted, but were willing to work and make this community their home.

            American immigration isn’t just Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.  Not eighty miles away from here, over 100,000 immigrants came to Oregon through the Knappton Quarantine Station on the Columbia River, from the 1880s to the 1920s.  We are literally a nation of immigrants, refugees seeking a better life.

            They came seeking what my friend wants: opportunity, freedom, a chance to be part of a great freedom-loving nation.

            We celebrate the Fourth of July, and in doing so, we also celebrate our history of welcoming others, to make this nation even stronger, even more a land of opportunity. 

            My family all wanted the same thing: opportunity.  They wanted justice, and freedom from violence and a dead-end, oppressive life.  They wanted a chance to prove themselves, and make a better life for their kids.  They were willing to work hard, and make sacrifices. 

            They built farms and schools, created communities, and raised their kids.  They worked hard, and helped make this country strong and healthy, a place where the rule of law and individual rights are common values. 

            My friend wants that, too.  He sees a bright future for himself and for his family here.  He’s working hard, and wants to do his part in making America an even healthier, stronger place, a place where freedom and justice for all is just not a political slogan, but a deeply held belief, and an aspiration for all of us. 

--Neal Lemery, July 6, 2016cr

Getting Sober

                                    Getting Sober

I’ve lived in the same small town almost all of my life, and we’ve always been riddled with the demons of addiction and wanting to find the magic wand of sobriety and recovery.

Much of my professional life in the law, and many of the conversations I have, even now, has been about people finding meaning in their lives and working on getting sober.  Addiction was certainly the “meat and potatoes” in my legal career. 

Our society is riddled with addiction, in all its crazy forms and actions.  You say “addict” and we think alcohol and drugs.  Insidious and destructive as those addictions are, there are others, equally powerful, equally destructive of our souls and our community. 

The list of dangerous, habit-forming thinking and actions is long; the list of destructive results is even longer. And your list looks a lot like mine.

            This cause and effect are often unmentioned and ignored.  It is the elephant in our village’s living room. To some extent, we all deal with it, in our own lives.  And, we see the devastation our addictions cause in the lives around us.

            Much of my work in the law came across my desk because of this addictive thinking.  Being the good lawyer, I worked to find the remedy so that people could find happiness and move on in their lives.  All too often, the addiction was too powerful, too all consuming.  And, it is hard to be clean and sober in a society where addiction, and addictive thinking, is an accepted way of life and a widely accepted theology. 

            Yet, we’ve come a long way since the days of my childhood.  As a kid, I was chastised for greeting a neighbor coming out of the liquor store, or commenting about someone being drunk on the street and asking “why”.

            We didn’t have AA in our community, and there were no alcohol counselors.  We knew there was plenty of addictive behavior, but addiction and complacency about its destructive ways simply wasn’t mentioned in polite society.

            I am so grateful for Betty Ford coming out publicly, talking about her addiction to alcohol and opioids and how inpatient treatment transformed her life.  At last, it was politically correct to talk about this taboo topic.

            Recently, I’ve had deep conversations about addiction, and turning our lives around, becoming healthy and clean.  It’s tough work, and we go deep with each other. Reaching out and being supportive is an essential part of the work, and the healing.

            Paul Carr writes in the Wall Street Journal about his struggles to become sober (March 19, 2012). He didn’t choose AA, but he says each of us has our own path:

“If it worked for me, it can work for anyone, right? Wrong. The chances that any of the advice here will work for you are vanishingly slim. So, too, are the chances that reading "How to Win Friends and Influence People" [Dale Carnegie’s classic book] will result in your doing either of those things. In truth, all self-help guides are guaranteed to work only for one person: the person who wrote them.

“The real secret to getting sober, and to repairing all the broken aspects of your life, is to take the time (probably through trial and error) to figure out the causes of your addiction and the aspects of your character that can be pressed into service in curing them. To do that, you'll have to figure out your own list of things you enjoy about drinking (for me: adventures, reckless spending, dating, etc.) and how you can keep those things alive through sobriety. Then you need to figure out what part of your personality will drive you to stay sober (for me: ego).

“And then, as every recovering addict will tell you, it's simply a question of taking one step at a time.”

—Adapted from Paul Carr's "Sober Is My New Drunk”.

            Today, my community has an active, visible AA community and a variety of mental health professionals. Sobriety and addiction are respectable topics of polite society’s conversations.  We even greet neighbors at the liquor store and openly support people in recovery. 

            Yet, in our search for economic viability, our community is busy funding and promoting brew pubs, and beginning to enjoy the tax revenue from the local marijuana stores.  Every bar promotes its state lottery games, and the game terminals are conveniently located next to an ATM, with the bartender happy to refresh your drink while you gamble.  Casinos advertise their first class celebrity entertainment, luring us inside for your Las Vegas experience. The Legislature depends on the state lottery to fund our schools and improve parks.

            Money talks. 

And, opioid addiction is at its highest level ever, as folks who have become dependent upon opioid pain killers then look for cheaper highs after the prescriptions run out. And, heroin is so much cheaper. A loaded syringe of heroin goes for $5, maybe less, right here in my town, cheaper than the black market for Big Pharma’s opioid pills.

            100 million opioid pills are prescribed in Oregon, and one out of three Oregonians has received a prescription for an opioid. Oregon ranks near the top nationally in opioid use and in deaths.  More people die from opioid overdoses here than car crashes.  (Medicine in Oregon, Oregon Medical Association, Winter 2016, page 12.)

            Big Pharma deluges us with TV ads, urging us to ask our doctor for medications and pain relief. Where are the ads about addiction; the social conversations about our addictive culture? 

            The addiction machine in our society is doing well.   

            And, you know good and well this scourge isn’t just here in the form of the strung out street person.  This addiction is alive and well everywhere. It’s alive and well with neighbors, friends, and, yes, even family.  It’s an uncomfortable truth.

            We’ve responded by turning the addicts into criminals, with the criminal justice system busy making felons out of addicts, and locking them up in our jail for twenty days or so at a stretch.  Our judges order them into treatment, and the system collects the court ordered fees for all that. But we don’t take on the tough conversations about really getting sober, or changing our culture’s addictive ways.

            I don’t have a magic wand, and I don’t have a “cure all” solution.  I wish I did; lives are literally at stake. But, I do know that one person, one conversation, one relationship can alter the course in a persons’ life, and begin the change toward how we as a community can heal.

            It takes a village, you know.

            Let’s start that conversation. Let’s get sober.

--Neal Lemery, May 25, 2016

Taking A Moment To Be Still

                                 

                                                               --by Neal Lemery

            It was unusual for me, just sitting there in my garden, being still and looking around.

            I’d had a long session with the trowel, the weed eater, and my hand pruners, attacking the weeds, setting out some plants, and generally tidying up my shade garden. Sweaty, dirty and tired, I found a chair and a bottle of water and decided to catch my breath.

            At first, I looked at what I’d done, and what I needed to do, mentally composing additions to my “to do” list. 

            This is becoming a job, I thought.  Gardening is a lot of work, and I’m tired.

            Maybe I should just take a moment and enjoy all of this, my own quiet corner of the world. I could let the sweat dry, thinking its OK that I just take a break.

            Lately, when I’ve been reading about gardening, I’m nose deep into the science and the methodologies about how to grow the best of whatever is involved in my latest garden project. 

In the midst of research on an interesting new plant, I’d come across a quote about gardening and my soul. 

“It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”

― Ray Bradbury

            Take a moment, take a breath, and enjoy the garden for what it is, I reminded myself.  Too often, my time here becomes an obligation, a project.  Hurry up, get it done, and move on to the next task.

            But, I am a gardener, not a laborer.  Gardening really is nurturing, and being IN the garden.  It is a time to nurture this place and my soul, to find peace, to let my mind be still and just BE.  After all, I am a human being, not a human doing. 

            And, so I became still, and sat there.  A swallow was building a nest in the new birdhouse, a hummingbird was enjoying the honeysuckle in bloom, sunlight played on the rhododendron bursting out in full glory.  I breathed in the fresh air, and all the smells of spring. 

            In the distance, a neighbor was mowing her lawn, and a farmer was tilling his field.  Off in the forest, a logger’s chainsaw provided the bass line for the house finch’s serenade in the snowball bush.  

            The real beauty in the garden, I realized, was not all the work I’d done, though I certainly had provided some tidying up and structure to this little piece of paradise.  But, I realized, the real joy in this place is all the creatures and plants that make this their home. 

            I’m only the host, and I only add a few of the finishing touches. 

            And, I realized, the most important part of my job here, as a gardener, is to sit in a chair, and just be here, finding my own peace, and be part of this magnificent paradise, to simply be in this moment.

            5/16/16