Perhaps you recall the movie, Gandhi. India in the 1940s fought and gained independence from England. But the Indian subcontinent split violently into Hindu and Muslim factions. The separate states of India and Pakistan were forming painfully as fighting, looting, and murder tore apart every village.
A summit meeting was held in the ornate Governor’s Palace in New Delhi. The British, Hindu, and Muslim leaders attended. The negotiations were intense. Suddenly Gandhi, with his tiny bag of possessions and walking stick, got up and started to walk out. “Where are you going? You cannot leave us. Stay,” begged the leaders. Said Gandhi: “I am going to Calcutta; that’s where the fire is.”
For more than 50 years I have been blessed to have worked with children, youth, and families and the often mistrusting neighborhoods in which they live. I have done street work, run my own agencies, and have been appointed to run a statewide agency by a governor and a nationwide agency by a President. I have met hundreds of people who have sustained, taught, and inspired me.
But the reference to Gandhi, which I’d not invoked or even remembered for decades was evoked just this week by the late Brian Doyle in his book One Long River of Song, a collection of essays, many of them award-winning, one of which “Dawn and Mary,” brought home the fact that those I’ll never forget, those who have sustained me, for they are my bedrock goad and inspiration in my 50-plus years of public service: they are those who go into the fire.
Doyle writes of Dawn a school principal and Mary the school psychologist, who were attending a staff meeting at a Connecticut grade school “when they heard a chilling sound in the hallway. (‘We heard pop-pop-pop, said one of the staffers later.’).”
“Dawn and Mary jumped, or leaped, or lunged toward the sound of the bullets,” writes Doyle. “Every fiber of their bodies –bodies descended from millions of years of bodies that had leaped away from danger –must have wanted to dive under the table…That’s how you live to see another day. That’s how you stay alive to paint with the littlest kids and work in the garden and hug your daughters and drive off laughing to your cabin on the lake.”
But no, they turned away from their evolutionary reflex for “….they leaped for the door, and Dawn said, Lock the door after us, and they lunged right at the boy with the rifle.”
I have been blessed to know such people, and while some have passed away, thankfully, none have died in action. Their powerful examples keep me from retiring by actively writing about them, celebrating them, because as Doyle says “…if we ever forget what they did, if we ever forget that there is something in us beyond sense and reason that snarls at death and runs roaring at it to defend children, if we ever forget that all children are our children, then we are fools who have allowed memory to be murdered too, and what good are we then? What good are we then?” (Doyle, Brian, One Long River of Song, Little, Brown and Co, 2019).
Written by Jack Calhoun
Mr. Calhoun is an internationally renowned public speaker and frequent media guest, editorial contributor and author of three books. He is the founder and CEO of Hope Matters. For more than 20 years, Mr. Calhoun was the founding president of the National Crime Prevention Council, prior to which he served under President Carter as the Commissioner of the Administration for Children, Youth and Families. Click on “Contact” to book Mr. Calhoun to speak at your next conference. All speaking topics are available at: www.HopeMatters.org/Speaker
