Making Our Lives Count

During the 1960s, many people had the attitude, as singer Neil Young best summed up, "It's better to burn out than to fade away." In 1967, one young man who was both a husband and a father became so enraged by the Vietnam War that he marched up to the Washington Monument carrying a can of gasoline and in front of a group of tourists burned himself to death.

But this is the 1980s, not the 1960s, and if anything, it seems we would rather have half the happiness and twice the longevity. Or more aptly, we would rather have twice the happiness and twice the longevity. I have a friend who is a college professor, and she sometimes wonders why she never sees students protesting on campuses anymore. It seems that we have turned in the opposite direction from the '60s.

Last fall I read an article in The Washington Post Magazine about Rodrigo Rojas, a man who was killed in Chile. The article described how his mother had been tortured, and how the military guard had poured gasoline all over his body, set him in flames, and then dumped him on the side of the road to die. When I finished reading the article, I was crying. Here I was, safe in my own house, and I was so helpless to do anything. I was paralyzed. But eventually I learned that it doesn't do any good to feel this kind of guilt.

The final episode of M*A*S*H* began with Hawkeye sitting in a psychiatric ward. In all of the earlier episodes, we had seen him striving to make things right, struggling to save a patient's life or to help another doctor. The problem was that he felt responsible for everything. He tried to solve every problem, and his sense of guilt at not being able to save every patient ultimately caused him to break.

We hear about AIDS or the war in the Middle East, about terrorism and about crime, and like Hawkeye we feel powerless to change everything or anything. We choose consciously, or unconsciously, to turn away.

Alan Alda, the man who played Hawkeye in M*A*S*H*, spoke at his daughter's college graduation. He said, "You can try to clean the air and water, you can try to put an end to organized crime, or you can try to make the justice system work. There's plenty to keep you busy for the rest of your life. I can't promise this will ever completely reduce your sense of absurdity, but it may get it down to a manageable level."

Alda was not simply telling the students to keep busy and fill their time with endless meetings or hours in front of the television set -- or even more drastically, with alcohol and drugs -- so that they wouldn't have to think about the hard questions. He was telling them to keep busy doing something constructive.

The problem is that the word "constructive" means different things to different people. It may mean raising a family or writing a book. It may mean working for justice in South Africa, or it may mean teaching school. But whatever it means, it involves risk.

BENJAMIN LINDER WAS an American who went to work in Nicaragua to build an electrical dam. He had a great love for the people with whom he worked. Once, the government was conducting a vaccination campaign, but it was having trouble convincing the kids to come to the clinics. So Ben got out his make-up and dressed up as a clown and walked down the main street of town getting the kids to follow him so that they could be vaccinated.

As Ben was doing this, he knew that any one of these children could be killed the next day in the war, and he knew that the dam he was building could easily be destroyed. Yet he persisted in his work. Ultimately he was murdered by armed guerrillas as he was out taking measurements for the dam.

However, Benjamin Linder's death was radically different from the man who burned himself at the foot of the Washington Monument. Ironically they both wanted the same things, but the man at the monument acted out of despair while Ben Linder acted out of hope, in spite of the risks.

Obviously most of us don't have to face the kind of danger that Ben Linder faced, but we do face many smaller risks in trying to make our lives count.

My family used to have an apartment in the inner city of Washington, D.C. During the time that we lived there, my stepdad, Paul, made friends with many people including a homeless alcoholic named Calvin who slept in stairwells and who always smelled like he'd never had a bath.

One day I came home and found the bathtub really dirty. I asked Paul about it, and he said that one of the neighbors had died and Calvin had wanted to clean up for the funeral service; so Paul had let him use our shower and lent him some clean clothes. I was really mad. Of course I wanted to help Calvin, but the thought of all his street dirt and germs in my shower really bothered me.

Later I was embarrassed by the way I had reacted. The bathroom could be cleaned and the clothes could be washed. Of course it was the logical thing to let him take a shower. But my initial reaction shows how we can become so consumed by our need for personal security and happiness that we ignore other people's problems.

At the same time, however, we have to make sure that we don't become so inflamed by the injustices around us that we destroy our own happiness and burn out. We must learn to search for and find the balance between foolish self-destructiveness and the equally fatal false security of selfish pursuits. We can find this balance by positive risk-taking and by being honest with ourselves. We need neither burn out nor fade away.

Ranked second in her high school senior class, Heather Dean was asked to speak at her baccalaureate ceremony in 1987. This article by Heather, who was finishing her first year at Emory University in Atlanta at the time of publication, was adapted from that speech.