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that we think have gone unnoticed by others, the suspicious feeling that others are all take and no give, or simply the nagging question, “why you and not me?”, “why them and not us?”, in a sentence, our human tendency to view the seeming happiness that comes from importance as a zero-sum game.
Which brings me back to David McCullough. Fortunately for me, Mr. McCullough continued to make many commencement addresses over the years. So many that, last year, he put some of his best into an anthology titled,
the american spirit: Who We are and What We stand For.
I imagine had I been in the audience
25 years ago willing to listen to what McCullough had to say, I would have heard some of the many excellent admonitions that fill the pages of this volume. Some of the most memorable include the precepts that “History is human. It is about people, and they speak to us across the years,” “Nothing happens in isolation,” and “Everything that happens has consequences.”
Had I been there, I might have heard Mr. McCullough bring these precepts together in his praise of Dr. Benjamin Rush, a lesser known Founding Father, of whom John Adams once wrote: “I know of no character living or dead who has done more real good in America.”
In an excerpt that captures this sentiment perfectly, McCullough reads the diary of
a Philadelphia woman named Elizabeth Drinker, a Quaker wife and mother whose large household included two free black children, boys aged seven and eleven, who to her alarm had taken severely ill.
Mrs. Drinker notes:
“Dr. Rush called,” she recorded April
8, 1794. “Dr. Rush here in forenoon. . .[despite] roads being so very bad” reads here entry for April 9. Dr. Rush called again on April 12, April 14, April 15, 17, 22, and 27, and on into the first week in May. . . He made fifteen house calls on those two boys by the time they were out of the woods.
Here, McCullough takes a set of dates, people, and places that easily could have been forgotten as numbers and letters
on a page - just like “Providence Christian College,” “May 5, 2018” and “Pasadena, California” and reminds us that history is a human story; that these people were real; that they faced challenges, and during some of those challenges, they rose to the occasion and showed humanity at its best.
In the best scenarios, heroes, like Benjamin Rush and Elizabeth Drinker, live not to gain recognition or to make history, but to live well.
At this point I may be risking crossing the line into the boilerplate address. Self-deprecation, check. Altruistic
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Deeper Learning for Greater Wisdom
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