Showing Up and Reinvigorating the Idealist Within

As we were besieged again last week with new reports of “now or never” climate change conditions from the United Nations, with stories of the hideous atrocities of war, with fears of more pollution from nuclear weapons manufacture, and ongoing worries about endless drought in the parched Southwest, news came of the death in Albuquerque at 82 of grocer John Brooks, a man I called in column long ago a true New Mexican idealist with long-term commitments to community service, local identity and humane labor practices.

Like so many others over the years, I always felt good when I had a chance to talk with John Brooks. I knew I was in the company of a thoroughly admirable, gentle, unassuming human being, a man committed to his ideals and a pragmatist when it came to bringing them to life.

John bought his first supermarket in 1978. It was a time when many big companies were gobbling up smaller stores all over town, my neighborhood included, and often contriving to get rid of their older employees with their costly “baggage” of benefits, replacing them with kids. But not John. He bought a big store on 12^th and Candelaria Rd NW in Albuquerque and kept his older employees, all of them, with all their benefits. Those of us who shopped there, have known the store’s cashiers, clerks and stockers sometimes for decades. When that supermarket burned down in the 1980s, John didn’t abandon the neighborhood. He rebuilt the store and designed it so it fit even more seamlessly into the environment. When he died last week, John had supermarkets here and in Milan, Ruidoso, Santa Fe and Socorro. In his heyday, his stores were in as many as thirteen New Mexico small towns, including Raton and Roy, catering to local needs and customs while at the same time competing successfully with the bigger stores. John Brooks had a quiet, smiling presence but he was a person who believed in doing what he considered to be the right thing to do. And from what I can tell, he did it all his life.

I’m sure most of us have people in our lives who we admire from afar, women and men who exemplify steadfastness and the kind of personal integrity, high ideals and generosity of spirit that inspires those around them — many anti-war and environmental activists, long-time teachers, stand up feminists, LGBT advocates, certain doctors, laboring people who take pride in their work and service, nurses, librarians, editors, social workers, kindly neighbors, hospice care companions, people who help you remember that the world is a far, far better place than it seems. And many of us are lucky enough, I know, to have such people as our good friends and members of our families.

These idealists all have something that tells us what they’d never think to say out loud because they are too focused on being at their best, on what lifts their spirits in the service of doing what they think is right, not out of anger or hate, but out of a sense of solidarity and humanitarian conscience.

I think their lives tells that when we feel ourselves being overwhelmed and besieged and baffled and disempowered, it’s time to search ourselves again for what we know is right to support, search ourselves so we can regenerate our own deepest ideals about right and wrong, and see what those ideals tell us to do and to say. For those of us who are older, this search has much to do with re-nurturing a generational solidarity with the cultural moment that shaped our view of the world. We come to realize we are still bearers of that culture which seems to have been superseded and forgotten. It still lives in us and still informs a good part of the human world.

Likely as not, a reinvigoration of our own ideals will both humble us and empower us. We might find the paradoxes untenable at times, but also find ourselves knowing that whatever small things we can do to be of service — to “contribute” as my mother and father’s generation would have said — is infinitely better than the paralysis of disempowered defeat.

We need to give ourselves our own manifestos, clean the barnacles of cynicism and world weariness off our deepest convictions. We might even uncover old core principles that have been buried in the distractions of the consumer driven, ideological game show and propaganda farce of what goes for the news these days.

The green and growing edge of my generation — those of us who came to political awareness in the 1950s and ‘60s — had as a core principle an abhorrence of waste and cruelty. The climate of opinion detested the waste of lives in the cruelty of war, the waste of talent and opportunity caused by the cruelties of sexism, racism, homophobia and classism, the waste of natural resources brought on by conspicuous consumption in a starving world, the waste caused by the demoralizing and physically debilitating cruel effects of poverty, the waste of humane possibilities in cruel prisons that merely punished rather than vocationally re-educated and paved the way for dignified employment, the waste of clean and healthy environment caused by pursuit of profit and the cruelty of “cost effective” pollution.

We didn’t know of climate change, but we did sense that the integrity of the natural world was being undermined by our way of life, a set of habits and expectations that I, and billions of other people around the world, pursued, embraced and even loved. It was not just about the greed of corporations and menacing ideological governments, but about the aspirations, comforts and convenience of virtually everyone. We knew even then, deep within, that we’d been sold on this way of life, sold a bill of goods that, like tobacco, we found it almost impossible to resist. But we tried, some more effectively than others, and learned the sting of hypocrisy first hand.

Many of us who were children in WWII, who saw the photographs of the monstrous carnage of that war, came to the same conclusion — that war was bestial and wrong, was indeed hell on earth in any form, even in self-righteous, “necessary” self-defense, a dark necessity to be atoned for in the end. I know that in my own family, the death of my great uncle in WWI caused the immediate death of his mother, my maternal grandmother, and the madness of his father, my maternal grandfather, and that his wasted life and the grief its loss had caused is mirrored in virtually billions of families around the world, down the generations, all victims of the cruelty of war, of war piled upon war.

Because of the world of friends and acquaintances I grew up with, and the social conditions we contended with, I saw with increasing astonishment and torment what sexism, racism, bigotry of all kinds, political scapegoating, unjust sentencing and psychological destitution can do to people. And if I search myself, I know I have a personal, reflexive antipathy to such injustice not because of any great insight, but because of what I know it’s done to people I care for, even though I’ve been lucky enough to miss much of it directly myself.

And many people in my generation understood right from the start the virtually infinite waste and cruelty that would be wreaked upon life-on-earth by humanity’s greatest folly — nuclear weapons, weapons that were first built in New Mexico, and will be built here again if activists today can’t stop it.

If John Brooks and I ever had the time for a long talk, we would have agreed I think that waste was an abhorrent dissing of life and other people. We are both the generational decedents of the Great Depression. We might also have agreed that generations and their values don’t vanish. They aren’t pushed off the table by newer ones. They don’t just vaporize under the pressures of disappointment, grief, sorrow, horrified astonishment, or the frustrations of technological bewilderments.

I’m pretty sure that John Brooks, and most of my older and younger friends, would nod in agreement if one of us said that who we admire the most, are not grandiose heroes, but people who, when times are tough, show up.

They find it in themselves to make choices and give their energies to what matters most to their better natures. They take little credit, aren’t falsely modest, but know it isn’t about them, that something worthy is moving through them and the people they work with. My late father-in-law, S. Jack Rini — was like that.

Jack was an old fashioned, depression-era conservative. We disagreed about most things politically. But I knew Jack hated waste and cruelty as much as I did. A man of strong feelings, his most profound expletive was “cussy darn!” He was repelled by nastiness and he never failed to leave his camp site cleaner than he found it, as they say. Small things, perhaps. But like John Brooks, Jack showed up. And that’s no mean feat in a crazy tumultuous overheated world like ours where, even now, if enough of us show up it just might make the difference between most of us surviving or most of us not.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it