A Reason to Believe_ Lessons From an Improbable Life - Deval Patrick [77]
On one occasion, a young woman who had been visiting her family from out of town had been shot and killed near the Holland School. Shortly after that, an eleven-year-old boy found a .44-caliber pistol in the neighborhood and brought it to school. The community was understandably in an uproar about the violence, so Boston’s mayor, Tom Menino, and I went out to the school to meet with the adults, listen to their ideas, and share some of our own.
The meeting was held at the end of the school day. As the children were leaving, heading to their buses or walking home, the parents, neighborhood activists, clergy, and other adults converged on the cafeteria. The contrast was striking. Here were the adults, serious and grim, worry and frustration etched on their faces, trudging toward the school, looking for answers. And here were the kids, playful and curious, sensing from the TV vans with their satellite dishes and extended antennae that something newsworthy was happening.
Before the meeting, I had a minute or two alone in the principal’s office to look over my notes and collect my thoughts. I glanced around the walls covered with student art and posters urging academic achievement or healthy choices. After a minute or two, I realized I was being watched. When I looked up, outside the window were a dozen or more little black boys and girls wearing backpacks, beaming and waving excitedly.
It was a touching scene, a reminder, on one level, of how far I’ve come in my own journey and of how far our nation has come. At their age, growing up in Chicago, I’m not sure I would have recognized the governor of my state, beyond perhaps knowing that he did not have my skin color. But those children, with all their joyful energy and unbridled dreams, reminded me that my work today must be about them, not me. Not the history I am making, but the history they have yet to make.
We each have a responsibility to the next generation. Everyone I have ever known was taught by his or her grandparents that our highest calling is to leave the world better than we found it. Meeting our generational responsibility may involve the grand gesture or a private act of grace or kindness, the historic accomplishment or some more personal form of service to the greater good. But it must be met. And it relies entirely on American idealism.
When I worked in Washington, I noticed that the city is crowded in the spring with tourists, especially schoolchildren on class trips. Seeing them in their T-shirts and sagging pants, speaking their own special slang, asking passersby about the nearest McDonald’s, one might wonder where to find the next generation of leaders. But I know they are there. They embrace the lingo and mannerisms of their generation just as each of us has in our own. But some of these children linger for a moment over the inscriptions in the Capitol rotunda or the Lincoln Memorial. Some become quiet when they gaze out across the Mall from the spot where the inaugural address has been delivered for generations. And in that moment of reflection, in that instant of inspiration, lies a seed of idealism waiting to grow.
As long as we do our job, as long as we bear our generational responsibility, those young boys and girls in Dorchester, the students I saw visiting Washington, and young people everywhere will carry with them the very ideals that have shaped the best of this country. And then someday they will lift up their own communities, make their own history, and give the next generation of Americans a reason to believe.