Making A Difference

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I graduated Cornell in 1991 – in love – and looking at what was next.  Colette was in pharmacy school and I started the dreaded job search.  Then, in the summer of 1991, my life changed.  I went to see the movie Boyz in the Hood with a friend of mine.  This brilliant movie by John Singleton told the story of a group of friends growing up in the ghettos of Los Angeles.  I was deeply impacted by this movie, and by the events that followed.  As I walked out of the movie, I was disturbed to hear a white male telling his girlfriend how funny he thought it was when some of the black characters were murdered in the movie.  How could this be?  How could he think something like that, let alone say it out loud?

On the way home from the movie, I saw a black gentleman sitting on a park bench.  I told my friend that I had to go talk to him.  Tom was the gentleman’s name.  I asked Tom if he’d seen the movie and he hadn’t.  I described it to him a bit, told him what the young man had said on my way out of the movie and asked for his take on things.  Tom and I talked for a couple of hours.  Nothing got resolved, but a new force had been awakened inside of me.  The concept of “making a difference” was born in me.  I’m sure it’s not the first time I had thought about making a difference, but in my memory, there was no memory of wanting to make a difference prior to that night.  I had a new question to live my life inside of, “How could I make a difference with my life?”

The first answer to that question was law school.  In 1992, I began studying law at Western New England College School of Law in Springfield, MA.  Law school was a breeze for me.  Don’t get me wrong I worked and despite the breakup with Colette coming smack dab in the middle of my three years, I managed to graduate in the top ten.  It just made sense to me.  It fit with how I tended to think.  As an advocate in the real world, lawyers are required to argue one side of the case zealously.  In law school, they’re just teaching you to see the arguments and to think like a lawyer.  I was a natural at arguing from both sides and going many layers deep.  Even though I didn’t enjoy the practice of law and am not practicing today, I have no regrets about going to law school.  

One other significant thing that happened to me in this time period between 1991 to 1994 was I read a book called Ishmael.  Daniel Quinn, the author, won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship for Ishmael.  The award was given to a book offering creative solutions to global problems.  Ishmael begins with the narrator viewing an ad in the local newspaper, “TEACHER SEEKS PUPIL.  Must have an earnest desire to save the world.  Apply in person.”  As it turns out, the teacher is a gorilla and we are in for quite a ride.  I’ve read this book many times and have gotten many things out of it, but the most significant was the idea that what we are living today is just one way to live.  

Today, we have this cultural story that one day thousands of years ago, humans appeared on the planet, they lived and eventually evolved into who we are today.  At the heart of Quinn’s work is the notion that who we are today is not an extension of all humans.  Instead, who we are today is an extension of one particular group of humans that invented one particular way to live, and so, the way we live today is not the way to live.  It’s just one way.  I’ll leave the rest of the details of his work to your own reading, but suffice it to say, I was deeply influenced by Ishmael and all of Quinn’s work.  Reading his work made what I write about in A Life Worth Living possible – the possibility of inventing a new way to live.

With the gaps filled in, we can now move on with the story.

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