A Little Not-So-Light Summer Reading

You know how sometimes when you finish a hard workout you know you’re going to hurt really badly the next day (and even more the day after that and the day after that)? Well, I finished a book yesterday, and I’m pretty sure it’s going to hurt for a while. This one has been sitting on my night stand for more than two years. I can’t remember where I first learned of it, but I remember hearing it would be a hard one. It was.

Bryan Stevenson’s haunting, often depressing, occasional-ray-of-hope-giving book, Just Mercy, has already started changing the way I see things. One hundred pages in, I found myself wishing it was fiction. After all, the similarities between the accounts he shares and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird are striking. I didn’t want to believe that the world depicted on the pages was real. But it is real- not in a, “Wow, I can’t believe things worked that way a long time ago.” kind of real. It is real in 2019, and it promises to be real into the foreseeable future.

As founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending the poor, wrongly condemned, and others needing advocacy in the tangled web of our country’s legal system, Stevenson and his organization have become the voice of the voiceless. Working to remedy the effects of mental illness, poverty, childhood trauma, racist politics, and the wrongs done by negligent court appointed council, EJI has been responsible for exonerating many innocent death row convicts, fighting for humane treatment of the mentally disabled in the US prison system, and successfully arguing cases in the US Supreme Court to change the statutes governing sentencing and rehabilitation related to juveniles.

Every year, I give family members a copy of my “book of the year” at Christmas. Titles such as Small Great Things (Jodi Picoult), Braving the Wilderness (Brene’ Brown), and Wonder (R. J. Palacio) have made the cut. I make my selection based on the book’s tendency to linger after I’ve read it and whether I think it will help us to become better humans. As I read this one, I kept thinking that this would be the 2019 winner, but it has so depressed me after closing the back flap, I question whether anyone would ever again open my small, rectangular package under the tree.

It’s petty of me to act like my experience reading this book was hard. In comparison to the situations that Stevenson describes in the book, I don’t know hard. As Americans, we should be ashamed that the reality he describes still exists in the country we call great. From my perspective as a public educator, I have seen the early stages of life for kids like the ones he describes. Ask any teacher with a few years of experience, and they’ll tell you that the number of students arriving at school with trauma-related issues and/or tragic home lives has skyrocketed in the past few years. As a curriculum leader, my focus has had to expand beyond the content taught in classrooms to provide learning and support for teachers who often struggle to manage classrooms filled with students who need far more than reading and math instruction. Schools contend with increasing student needs, insufficient structures and funding for properly addressing these needs, a myopic focus on standardized test scores by lawmakers, and a savvy political machine set on discrediting public schools which are often the sole antidote for preventing the pipeline of future juvenile offenders. Maybe it’s just my leftover weariness from an especially hard school year, but all this has me feeling a little short on hope.

But Stevenson talks about that. Toward the end of the book he recounts the day he nearly quit. In one of his exhausted moments, he recalled the words of Thomas Merton.

We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.

He didn’t quit. He couldn’t. And we can’t either. In whatever way we were created to make the world better, we must. And at least in my case, this book challenged me to do more. A leadership adage I often remember is, “You are perfectly organized to get the results you are getting.” The results we are getting – children in trauma, prison pipelines being predicted based on poverty and reading levels, disparate experiences with the legal system based on the color of a person’s skin – can’t be the results we want. From a practical standpoint, I’m now reflecting on how I can do more. A few ideas come to mind: learn more about the legal system and how it is impacting vulnerable populations (the EJI website is a good place to start), read more texts from people of color to learn more about how my white privledge has limited my perspective about the struggles others face, speak boldly to bring awareness and light to places where we see disproportionality and injustice, volunteer – just start somewhere, show compassion and support to teachers who are working every day to ensure that students’ lives don’t end up on this path, or donate to EJI or other organizations dedicated to righting such wrongs. Basically, my goal is to have more empathy and let that empathy manifest in action, not just feeling.

This year, I’ve experienced a fair amount of the personal brokenness of which Thomas Merton speaks. I find comfort in thinking that there is beauty in that brokenness and that one outgrowth may be the deep compassion Just Mercy awakened in me. My prayer now is that I don’t go back to sleep.