Gratitude

Located less than an hour from Ashland, the Massillon Museum is a wonderful art and history museum currently featuring exhibits on Fashion Outlaws, Masters of American Photography, and The Life of a Migrant Community. The museum spearheads a community-wide The Big Read, in which all local residents are encouraged to read the same book at the same time, Julia Alvarez’s “In the Time of the Butterfly.” There’s also a permanent exhibit of the Immel Circus, and best of all, admission is free – check it out soon!

I’ve been working with them on a capital campaign to expand their downtown location and to create dedicated space for the Paul E. Brown Museum, preserving their community’s unique football heritage. That fund drive received a tremendous boost from the state capital budget this week, and its announcement took me back about eight years to the day I held a million dollar check from the state of Ohio in my own hands.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t my tax refund. No, the payee on the check was The Salvation Army Ray and Joan Kroc Corps Community Center here in Ashland. Thanks to the work of Dr. Lucille Ford and the support of then Senate President Bill Harris, Ohio provided support for the construction of the Kroc Center. While much of the project was funded by a gift from the estate of Joan Kroc, we’d been tasked with raising local matching dollars, and the state grant was an essential part of that fund-raising.

The new Salvation Army center opened in April of 2009, and as we drove in the less-than-delightful April snow last weekend, Larry reminded me of what we were doing seven years ago – preparing to march with the Salvation Army New York Staff Band from the tired old citadel on East Third Street to the sparkling new facility on East Liberty Street. There was no snow under our feet that Sunday, as the band’s brass music disturbed the Sabbath rest along Main Street. What a celebration we had that weekend, as we welcomed most of Ashland to the brand-new Kroc Center.

The marking of significant dates in the life of an organization, individual or community helps us reflect on where we’ve been and where we hope to go. So at this seventh anniversary, I do hope The Salvation Army’s expanded presence has blessed the Ashland community. That was the prayer of those who worked tirelessly on planning, fund-raising, and construction, and continues to be the prayer for The Salvation Army’s work in Ashland.

On a personal note, changes have occurred in my own life in the intervening years since that grand Dedication Day parade. I’ve said good-bye to my mother, and welcomed two precious granddaughters to our family, the lovely Madelyn Simone and the delightful Elizabeth Holiday. Faced with a change of assignment, I retired from full-time Salvation Army work, and now spend my days as a free-lance writer, doing whatever my hands (and computer keyboard) find to do – as well as spending time with those beautiful little girls. As a smitten immigrant, I do hope my presence has blessed the Ashland community nearly as much as I’ve been blessed by Ashland.

I’ve enjoyed watching the changes in our community as well. It seems as though we’re doing better economically than seven years ago, and I’m glad to see the gradual downtown revitalization. And how much fun was the Bicentennial Celebration! We shouldn’t have to wait another hundred years to have such a great party – are you up to the challenge, Rick and Kim Spreng?

As I’ve reminisced these last few days about my life’s intersection with Ashland and the Kroc Center, it’s been with an extreme sense of gratitude. Melody Beattie expresses it so well: “Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.”

Thank you, Ashland, for feasts, friends, and a place to call home – here’s to a bright vision for tomorrow!

Ready to Rumble

My favorite clip from the NCAA basketball tournament is commentator Charles Barkley doing a celebratory jig at the end of the men’s championship game. He predicted the North Carolina Tar Heels would win, but when Villanova’s final-second shot claimed victory for the Wildcats, Sir Charles did a high-spirited happy dance. While his daughter is a Villanova fan, it appeared to me that Barkley’s exuberance welled up from his love of the game, not necessarily from his allegiance to any particular team.

I hope someone (besides mom) is telling these hundreds of college basketball players what a terrific run they’ve had, win or lose. It’s a shame that athletes who train for years and years to reach the pinnacle of their careers have to face defeat. I have no idea how sports could be redesigned so that everyone could win – or at least so no one would have to lose, but I feel really bad for the underdogs, those who just can’t make it to the victory circle.

Years ago, we ran Salvation Army youth basketball leagues at locations in Philadelphia and Cleveland. The basketball games were played in traditional fashion, but those victories were augmented by points earned by the kids for Sunday School attendance and scripture memorization. It was conceivable that on-the-court losers could garner extra points to raise their standing in the league. That strategy boosted Sunday School attendance at our church and others in the neighborhood for a few weeks, but when the team with the best record didn’t win the trophy, it definitely created some friction among participants and parents.

The concept of winning and losing permeates our culture far beyond the world of sports, and we learn its lessons early. The lovely Madelyn Simone likes to play board games, and we recently tried out the Dora the Explorer Memory Game. She hadn’t played Memory before, but by our second round, she was arranging the cards so she could control who would be the winner – and it wasn’t me. The experience of playing the game can be fun, but at six, Madelyn has already figured out it’s more fun if you’re the victor.

I get that. It makes sense in basketball and “Go Fish.” But as I checked the results of the recent primary race for county commissioner here in Ashland county, I was frustrated there could only be one winner. James Emmett Justice, Pam Mowry, and John Hadam all seemed well-qualified, with prior service to the community and good ideas for the future of Ashland. Each received 3000+ votes, and Justice won the primary election by only 53 votes out of the 10,000 votes cast. Is that the best way to choose those who will govern us?

That question is huge when we consider the on-going circus of the presidential primaries and the predicted hoopla and maneuverings of the up-coming conventions. In theory, one person, one vote sounds really good, but the long, brutal campaigns, the 24/7 media presence, and the influence of the super-PACs threaten to serve up a bruised and bloodied POTUS on November 8, 2016. Do we really want our national leader to be the last person standing after a fierce battle? Instead of choosing someone with the skill of Jack Nicklaus or Tiger Woods, the accurate shot placement of Venus and Serena Williams, or the cohesive play of the USA women’s soccer team, we’re witnessing a year-long Royal Rumble, where thirty wrestlers enter the ring. One by one they’re thrown over the top ropes until there is only one survivor. Forget the survival of the fittest – it’s the survival of the luckiest, or the pre-selected, scripted competitor. No wonder The Donald, the WWE Hall of Famer who won the Battle of the Billionaires at WrestleMania 23, is still standing.

Are we learning anything from this election cycle? If the hanging chad debacle of 2000 didn’t wake us up, will the campaign of 2016 force us to look at the process of electing the president of the United States? If we truly want the best person equipped to lead our country, there’s got to be a better way than bellowing, “Let’s get ready to rumble!”

The Temptation to Disengage

I recently finished up a new book, “Eliza and the Midwife: A Story in Human Trafficking,” coming this month from Frontier Press. It’s an account of a fascinating historical event in the early days of The Salvation Army, when a concerted effort by a coalition of prominent London residents raised the age of consent in Great Britain. As part of their strategy, a thirteen-year-old girl, Eliza Armstrong, was purchased for prostitution to prove how easily it could be done. Through a series of lurid articles in the Pall Mall Gazette, one of London’s newspapers, the details of the underworld of brothels were exposed to all of London and beyond through ink on newsprint.

As I worked on this nineteenth century narrative, I thought about how the media in today’s world might have covered Eliza’s story. The young woman who went undercover in a brothel might have worn a hidden camera, hourly social media posts and tweets from W.T. Stead (the newspaper editor) would have kept the public informed, and Anderson Cooper would have gotten sound bites from Eliza’s parents and Queen Victoria. No need to wait two weeks for the six-part newspaper series.

The expansion of media coverage that has happened in my lifetime fills our every waking moment with real-time tragic events from every continent. As a result, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the destructive winds swirling around us. Some days, I long to breathe, “Calgon, take me away.” Yet even my fantasy escape routes are failing me, as Downton Abbey is finished, the Good Wife is on her last legs, and Tony is leaving NCIS. What’s a girl to do?

I re-discovered one possible escape outlet that I described on Facebook recently: “Sitting with the husband watching Jeopardy. We are old.” Disclaimer: I do like Jeopardy, so no hate mail please. Jeopardy is mentally challenging, and there’s probably been a study done about its ability to prevent Alzheimer’s disease, especially if accompanied by a nightly dish of ice cream.

In my younger years, I watched game shows a lot. Jeopardy, Concentration, Let’s Make a Deal, and Password were favorites, and I especially liked Supermarket Sweep, where people went on shopping sprees to find the highest ticket items so their carts rang up the maximum cash register tape. In preparation for my own possible appearance as a contestant, I plotted my shopping route around Loblaws, and also dreamed up heart-wrenching sob stories to plead my case on Queen for a Day (another youthful favorite).

It’s tempting to turn to game shows and other outlets to escape the reality of our world. Disengagement beckons me, and like the sirens of Greek mythology, its wooing is seductive. Don’t watch that debate, watch me instead. Don’t get involved. After all, someone else will step up.

How much responsibility do we have for our community, our country, our world? As man’s inhumanity to man invades our homes, our computer screens, and our phones, it’s no wonder we’re tempted to tune them out and sink into re-runs of Everyone Loves Raymond or Jeopardy. But as Alan Paton, the South African author of “Cry, the Beloved Country” understood, “There is only one way in which one can endure man’s inhumanity to man, and that is to try, in one’s own life, to exemplify man’s humanity to man.” Truth.

Yet is our world worse than the one Eliza Armstrong faced in 1885? Despite the pervasive doomsday messages of the media, Dr. Bradley Wright paints an alternative picture in “Upside: Surprising Good News About the State of our World.” In his research, he discovered our world is getting better. In the U.S., literacy is up and crime is down, and Americans live longer than ever before. Worldwide, 95% of countries surveyed show an increase in life expectancy, education and income.

The media has a responsibility to expose the darkness. Jeopardy has a responsibility to entertain. We have a responsibility to keep each in perspective, even in an election year. To paraphrase Ecclesiastes, “There is a time for CNN, and there is a time for Jeopardy.” Now hand me the remote, please.