Virtual Civic Saturday: Perseverence
Below are the full text of the “civic scriptures” and “civic sermon” read during the event.
Civic Scripture
From the late Senator Margaret Chase Smith’s “declaration of conscience”:
Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americansim -
The right to criticize.
The right to hold unpopular beliefs.
The right to protest.
The right of independent thought.
The exercise of these rights should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right to a livelihood nor should be in danger of losing his reputation or livelihood merely because he happens to know someone who holds unpopular beliefs. Who of us does not? Otherwise none of us could call our souls our won. Otherwise thought control would have set in.
The American people are sick and tired of being afraid to speak their minds lest they be politically smeared as Communists or Fascists by their opponents. Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America. It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others.
From Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham City Jail”:
We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of good people. We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.
From the American author and artist, Mary Anne Radmacher:
Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying 'I will try again tomorrow.'
From the farewell address of President Dwight D. Eisenhower:
As we peer into society’s future, we - you and I, and our government - must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.
Down the long lane of history yet to be written, America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.
Civic Sermon
I started to write this civic sermon at least a dozen times over the past few weeks. Sometimes with pen and paper, sometimes on the computer, other times just speaking my thoughts aloud to myself in the car while I drove around. But every time I had the same experience - I hit a wall. I found it hard to focus on writing when there were so many other things in our world that I felt I needed to worry about.
There’s Covid, obviously, where earlier this week our state surpassed 100,000 cases and saw record-breaking numbers of people hospitalized and in the ICU due to the disease. When we crossed the 100,000 cases mark on Monday, I did some quick arithmetic and posted the result to Twitter, stating simply: 1 in 37 Oklahomans has been diagnosed with COVID-19. As of today, that tweet has been shared nearly 300 times and liked by more than 600 people. However, it did nothing to stop the six deaths that were reported that same morning, nor the other 50 deaths that have been reported in our state since then. By the time this is over, the odds are we’ll all have lost someone we know to the disease. Wondering who - and how many - can be downright crippling.
Then there’s the impending election, which is arguably of larger consequence for the future of our great nation than any other presidential election in two generations. It sure feels that way, at least. You can’t escape it. Billion-dollar campaigns are now the new normal, with ad buys designed to permeate every form of media we consume. In the face of unprecedented attacks on voting rights and our electoral process itself, we find ourselves looking for help from the companies we love to hate - Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have all reminded me to register to vote nearly every day for at least the past six weeks. Even Yelp got in on the action, interrupting me with an election reminder while I was trying to look up what time Roxy’s Ice Cream store closed one night. I wanted ice cream, and I got politics. Maybe that’s smart marketing, though - catching people in their moment of vulnerability.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the impending election are stress-inducing events for lots of reasons, and it's important to acknowledge that not only have they added stress to our lives, they have amplified other, baseline, "normal" stressors that we all experience every day. Something as simple as going to work or buying groceries now requires additional research, planning, and strategy. Getting food from a restaurant, buying toilet paper, going for a run, voting - it's all different now. We find ourselves cut off from our friends and family, restricted to open-air hangouts at the end of the driveway, nervously wondering if our children are asymptomatic carriers and fearing they'll infect their grandparents. Hugs, once relished in my family like chocolate icing on a big slice of yellow cake, have been sidelined completely.
How do we carry on when everything feels so bizarre, so distant, so uncertain?
While the circumstances have changed, the associated feelings are not new to most Oklahomans. Amongst our American brethren, we are uniquely accustomed to the sudden and complete interruption of life. Many of us know someone - or several someones - who have had their trees and lives uprooted by a tornado. I vividly remember my friend Jon tweeting that he had just watched his house in Moore get blown away on the news...on a television in the hospital, where he sat with his newborn child in the NICU. Or my friend Amy, who sat across the desk from her boss at 9:01 am on April 19, 1995; and a moment later the wall and the floor and her boss were all gone.
This year was supposed to be the 20th annual Oklahoma City Memorial Marathon, but, like everything else, the event was forced to become "virtual." Registrants received boxes in the mail with their shirts and blankets and medals, along with instructions to run their selected race sometime in the two weeks between October 4th and tomorrow, October 18th. I don't know if you know this, but there are a lot - I mean, a LOT of marathons out there - but the Oklahoma City Memorial Marathon is different from all the rest. It was the first half marathon I attempted when I started running in 2014, and this year will be my sixth time. Once I actually run it, I mean. Because, as I mentioned at the beginning of my talk, I don't know about about you, but lately I'm having a hard time finding the motivation to keep going. I don't know what I'm waiting for, exactly...but I do think it seems appropriate for us to talk about perseverance today.
Regardless of how you feel about running, we can all admit that it provides a wonderful analogy for just about everything in life. And while sports drinks and fancy, stretchy clothing have renewed our interest in running for exercise and sport, running has been a part of human existence since…forever, really. Scientists believe that one of things helped humans rise to the top of the evolutionary food chain is our ability to run long distances and simply wear out our prey and other predators. People, it seems, were built to keep going.
And, perhaps that’s why running has been used as an analogue for getting through life for thousands of years. You can even find running analogies in the Bible. The Apostle Paul wrote letters to the church at Corinth and to his friend Timothy that include phrases like "running to win" and "finishing the race,” which is somewhat ironic because history records Paul as being not just blind and bald but also bowlegged, an affliction that would have made running unduly difficult for him. Perhaps that’s the reason why running analogies resonated with him so strongly. He knew, quite intimately, how hard it was to simply keep going.
I took up running when I was in my early 30s, after the birth of my first child. I was pretty clearly running from existential dread; it was my attempt to avoid or postpone or at least slow down the inevitable aging and weakening of the human body that befalls all of us. When I started running, I learned a lot about myself, about other people, and about how we all interact and flow together as one community. When you run through the streets of your town you see and feel all the cracks, all the bumps, all the glistening lawns and empty lots, the formidable mansions and the homeless shelters, the exhaust of our cars and the exhaustion of our resources, the children at the park and the dirty needles in the gutter.
Obviously, I’m not here to talk about running. I’m here to talk about stuff that’s way harder than running. Community-level change. Making a difference in the lives of our neighbors. And why it is so danged important that, even when it gets hard, you keep going.
To do that, I’m going to share with you the three most important lessons I have learned from running: It’s easy starting out, Just make it to the next block, and Never waste a downhill.
Lesson 1: It’s Easy Starting Out
This one seems obvious. All you have to do find a place to run, lean forward a little bit, put one foot in front of the other, and let gravity do the rest. It feels…natural, right? After just a few steps you begin to build up some momentum and feel the breeze in your face and, Wow! Look at you! You’re doing it! You are running!
I love the beginning of a race, especially big ones, like marathons. Thousands of people joined together with a common purpose. It’s dark, the music is thumping, the air is absolutely electric. There is a collective sense of We’re going to do this. We’re going to run and we’re going to finish, and it’s going to feel great. Look at how awesome we are.
And as you stand in that corral, you may begin to look around at the other runners, sizing them up, trying to decide which ones "look like real runners,” which ones you think you can beat, trying to make yourself feel better and justify your presence there by devaluing others. “Look at them. Psh. What do they know about running? Look at those shoes. Look at that old guy. Is that a fanny pack? Ugh." Don't give in to those thoughts. Viewing your neighbors as competitors rather than teammates is a surefire way to suck the joy out of the experience.
Because once you start running, you'll soon realize that what you thought was a solo exercise is really a group project. The more you try to look out for yourself, the more likely you will collide with someone else, particularly if they are only looking out for themselves.
Like so much of life, running a marathon is a community effort. The road is long and if we’re going to get there, we must realize that we’re all in this together and therefore we need to lookout for one another, encourage one another, and try not to get in each other’s way.
Lesson 2: Just Make It To The Next Block
Before long, you notice the crowd around you is thinning. Some people are still cruising along, but others are breaking to walk or stand and stretch and catch their breath. You begin to question yourself and what you’re doing. Doubt creeps in. "Should I walk? Why did I start down this road in the first place? Ugh, what if I can’t finish? Do I even want to finish any more? Is there a way for me to quit so that no one will notice?”
In any race, there are a million points along the way where you may feel like giving up. I get it. It’s hard, it’s uncomfortable, it feels lonely, it makes you hurt. Caring about something and sticking with it to the end requires incredible stamina and grit. While things were easy starting out when everyone was there together, now you look around and may not recognize the people around you. The rallying music has faded and the finish line feels impossibly far away. So you pull over to the side, step out of the flow, and disconnect a bit from the community around you.
It's okay to take a break if you need it; there is absolutely no shame in that. But, I have found that if you tell yourself "just make it to the next block" before you stop, often you'll end up going two or three more as well. Sometimes, just giving yourself permission to stop provides enough relief that you don't need to actually stop at all. You're doing the best you can, and you can make it to the next block.
Lesson 3: Never Waste a Downhill
Every race has hills. Some are well known and highly anticipated, like Gorilla Hill in the Oklahoma City marathon, where the local residents of a big yellow house along the route rent a 30-foot inflatable gorilla and volunteers dress up and hand out bananas to runners. Other hills are smaller, less flashy. Some are low and long, like the rolling highways of western Oklahoma. Regardless of the size of the hill, I am always thankful to reach the top. It feels like an accomplishment, something to be celebrated, and, too often, a permission slip to stop trying. After all, what goes up must come down, and what better time to walk than when gravity is pulling you along?
One of my former running buddies has a habit of shouting “Never waste a downhill” whenever we reached a peak. She recognized that our natural inclination is to put in less effort when the road gets easier. Which is silly, of course - that kind of complacency is exactly how the hare lost to the tortoise in Aesop's classic fable. When we see that things may be easier ahead, we should press on even harder. If the wind is at our back, we can accomplish more than we might otherwise. We should call to the others around us, rally them to the cause, and not let that downhill go to waste. We. must. keep. going.
One more thing
Before I bring Chris back up to take us out with a song, if you'll permit me, I'd like to add one more lesson that I learned from running. I wasn't really planning to share this, but as we've gone along today, I think it's fitting for where we're at as a country and as a community.
On April 30, 2017, I was running the Memorial Half-Marathon, per usual, and I just was not into it. I had not really trained for it, it was cold and rainy, and I was grumpy about the whole deal. I was running by myself and felt disconnected from the event and the people around me. As I came west down 23rd Street, under the highway and started up the hill toward McDonald's, I ran into my friend Adi. Adi is a gifted yoga instructor and a talented writer and, I recently learned, when she was younger, Adi was an aspiring advocate who wanted to “free the dolphins.” As luck would have it, Adi is also a runner. Not a “runner” like me - she is a legit ultramarathoner. 50 milers, 100 milers, this girl can get after it.
Anyway, there I was, wallowing in my own self-loathing about my poor performance in the race when I see Adi stopped in the middle of the road, on a hill, trying to hold still the wheelchair she was pushing while she stretched a rain fly over the little girl who sat in the chair. I helped her get situated and then we continued on along the course, laughing and talking as we jogged.
After a couple of miles, Adi paused and graciously said “Andy, you don’t have to stay with us. We’ll just slow you down.” Little did she know - they were the only things keeping me going.
I had never run with a rider before. I saw people in chairs during races, but I knew nothing about them aside from that very passive awareness. I assumed whoever was pushing them was a friend or relative, but in this case, I learned that Adi had simply volunteered, and by sheer luck of the draw she was paired up with Mariela.
From the moment I started running next to Mariela, I...disappeared from public view. There were still runners streaming past us on all sides, and literally everyone offered words of genuine encouragement - “Good job!” “You’re doing great!” “Keep it up!” - all of it directly squarely at Mariela. Who, I must admit, soaked it up with a smile from ear to ear. “Thank you!” she’d call back after each one.
We didn’t run the whole way, and when we did run, we were slow. It’s hard enough to push your own body down the street for 13 miles; an additional 70 lbs of chair and rider makes it that much more difficult. My time ended up being a full 30 minutes slower than the year prior, but I didn’t care.
When we were about a mile from the end, Adi leaned over to tell me that Mariela’s family would be waiting near the finish line with her walker, and we were going to get her out of the chair so she could walk across the finish line herself. And so, we did. This photo explains how it felt.
My entire perspective on running changed that day. I had been focused on just getting to the finish line and doing it for me. And if that’s where you’re at because that’s where you need to be, that’s perfectly fine. You gotta be present for yourself, I get that and I affirm that. You do you. But, hear me out - what if you also show up for the folks around you?
America has this weird thing about rugged individualism and bootstraps and blazing your own trail and all this. We’re like a teenager who thinks they can make it in the world on their own without any help from anyone because they have a car and a job making sandwiches at Subway. Too often we - collective we, societal we - fail to appreciate or even acknowledge the relationships and reciprocity we have with other nations, with other states, with other cities, with the people who live in the neighborhood across the highway or the house right next door.
What if we acted like we’re all running side by side? What if it wasn’t a “race,” but rather, just run with friends? What if your neighbor needed you to push them? What if you needed them to push you?