Grad at Grad: Committed to Doing Justice by David Palladino Transcribed from a speech given February 6, 2017 Thank you, Dr. Ross. I was asked to talk to you about being committed to doing justice. But the first thing is that I have a problem with that phrase. Because I don't really think that justice is something you can do. It makes seem like you have a lot more power than you really have. Because there's literally no one in this room that's going to change the world. And that's important enough that I'm going to say it again. There's not a single person in this room that's going to change the world. BUT, if you let the world change you, now we're getting somewhere. And let me tell you what I mean. One of the great things about the world is the diversity of backgrounds, cultures, and experiences. It's one of the things that makes the world such a wonderful place to be. But, when we get to the heart of it, when we strip away all those superficial differences, we're really just all the same. Our humanity really makes us all one. And, when you think about it, what does our humanity mean? What do we need? We need food. We need water. We need oxygen. We need shelter. And we need love. And that's universal. All the other stuff is window dressing. And the word for that is solidarity, the ability to recognize the oneness that we all share, even though your experience might be wildly different from someone else's. Because we're all human, we can find a way to put ourselves in their shoes, and feel what they feel, because our basic humanity makes it all the same. I want to tell you a couple of stories about two people I met on my very first service trip here at Loyola. In fact it was my first service trip anywhere. The first one, her name is Gladys Shepherd. And my group on the service trip, we were selected to paint the outside of her house. And that house was really important because it didn't just house Gladys - and I don't remember the circumstances behind this - but she was raising her two grandkids. So, it was really important that we do a good job so that they would have a wonderful place to grow up. And the thing about Gladys was that before we even met her we had this feeling about her because the gentleman who organized all of our trips, he said, "Oh, you got the Cookie Lady!" Because any time anyone from this organization went out to Gladys's house just to arrange for our visit to come out and paint her house, she would bake them cookies. She was so overjoyed, so grateful, she couldn't believe it. And sure enough, when we showed up, there was a nice batch of warm chocolate chip cookies for us. Out of the little that she had, she just wanted to give because other people were giving to her. She'd never even met us. And then we spent the week getting to know each other. We were there five days. And here we were, these New York City people in the coal country of Kentucky, and we didn't feel any differences at all. You know, it's really incredible the feeling of love and connection that can emanate when you let the world change you.
In fact, I have this old watch. It's all broken and it doesn't work anymore. But I hesitate to throw it away because it has a little fleck of paint from Gladys's house from when we painted her house. And it reminds me of a time of when the world changed me, and I don't think I'm going to be throwing it away anytime soon. We also met a guy named Ray. And Ray's story is one that could probably be told by literally thousands of men in eastern Kentucky. The coal industry had pulled away, so if you were undereducated, you really had no prospects for any kind of a future, no chance at a good job, no chance at a life for you and your family And like a lot of eastern Kentucky men, Ray fell into a lot of things he wouldn't have otherwise fallen into. He ended up a drug addict and an alcoholic, developing the disease of addiction. He ended up in jail. He was our guest speaker, and he told us his whole story one night, and I think that it was just a part of his own penance to keep his own sobriety up, by hoping that these students from New York or whoever might come through that organization, that they wouldn't become like him. Sort of like Jacob Marley telling Scrooge, "Don't live the way I did. You'll end up like me. That's the worst." That's the way he took it. And yet, here are these kids from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and they couldn't have loved him any more. They just had this connection with him. Some of our students, after giving him a standing ovation, sat with him for another hour. And we just kept talking, and talking, and talking. And I don't think he expected these New York City kids to actually connect with him, to be one with him. And they were so connected with him that, over the next couple of days, a few of them found a giant piece of plywood and they painted it and they made a sign. It said, "Ray's Auto Body," because one of Ray's goals in his sober life was to open an auto repair place. So we invited him back, and we gave him the sign a couple of days later, and he was just bawling. He couldn't imagine this little act of love coming from these kids that he had just met a few days before, and they were just so with him. It wasn't even an act of, "We feel bad for him, let's make him the sign." It was an act of, " We want to be in on this. We want him to know that we are behind him. So, it was this wonderful moment. But a year later, we went back for our second trip out there, and I was outside with a few students, and we saw Ray walking by. So, some of the students who had been with us the year before, they called out to say hello, and within thirty seconds of starting this conversation with Ray, it was pretty obvious that he was no longer sober. And certainly, the dream of the whole auto body repair shop was gone. It was never going to happen, at least not at that time. It would have been really easy to see our work with Ray as a failure and him as a failure, and to wonder, "What was the point? We did something nice for him, and he couldn't do his part." And, that's the tough part with this solidarity and this justice, because I think of Ray and I can hear the echoes from when I was a kid of various adults in my life say things like, "Oh no, we're not going to give that person a dollar. They're probably going to buy drugs with it." As I think of Ray's story, I think of two things. One thing: he was a failure. And sometimes when we think
about failure, we think about people not deserving things. But the reality is, every one of us has been a spectacular failure at some point, and someone else has pulled us up even though we probably don't deserve it. And that's something we have to remember about everyone. And the second thing is the "otherness." It's so easy to label. It's so easy to stick a label on someone, and as soon as you do that, you start denying that we're the same. I go back to what I said at the beginning. You're not going to change the world, but if you let the world change you, it's a start. Because we are so used to, especially right now, in 2017, you can take out your phone, you tap it, and then something just happens. You get a car. You get food. You get whatever you want, and it just shows up. We are used to doing something, and getting a result. And the problem is that we don't do justice. Justice is something that happens. Justice is like a flower that grows. You water it, but you don't make the plant do anything. And that's the challenge. Because if you're going into being committed to "doing" justice, like you're going to be some kind of hero, you're going to feel a sense of disillusionment and failure, because you're going to feel like you're not able to do anything. When you think about the great social justice movements in the history of the world - think about the civil rights movement and the women's rights movement - those have been going on for a couple of centuries, and they're still not finished. And so, what I ask to consider is, in this aspect of being more committed to doing justice, is, like it says in the famous Ken Untner "Romero Prayer," forget about the results. You may never see them. We may never see the fruits of what we did for Ray. Maybe he's sober right now after four tries because he felt a sense of hope from years ago from some kids that have lost touch with him. Maybe it's not going to happen for hundreds of years. But when you open your heart to the idea that the world can change, when you open your mind to the fact that we are all the same, it's the first step to creating a world of justice. Thank you.