Editor’s Desk: Issue 5
As a kid, I always thought I’d grow up to be a professional athlete. I spent most of my childhood and my formative years travelling state-to-state for club soccer tournaments, initially for my older sister and later for myself. Like most boys from Sissonville, I played football, basketball and baseball as well. Sports to our families were a year-round commitment. Much of my knowledge about life, about camaraderie and about people stems from countless experiences under stadium lights with a ball at my feet or in my hands. I learned very young that my father’s favorite athlete (and poet) was Muhammad Ali, and now, alongside my father and my mother, Ali is one of my only real-life heroes.
I’ll never forget my first time reading Ali’s declaration printed in Time Magazine in 1978 that “Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.”
This value was instilled in me for as long as I can remember—by my family, by the Sissonville community, by my coaches and teammates. I have carried this truth with me throughout my life and use it often when making decisions, both about everyday happenings as well as in relation to the bigger questions like Purpose and Passion and Profession.
Some 15 years later, the grand sum of all such decisions in my life had made me a college student and placed me in a small one-bedroom apartment in Huntington—then infamously dubbed “The overdose capital of the world,” with an ever-worsening homelessness crisis—sometimes only able to make my monthly rent with the help of my family. I was studying journalism, English and history at Marshall University when I found myself faced with a choice to find ways to serve my community or, as Ella has written before, to “navigate more smoothly in willful ignorance.”
In truth, willful ignorance was never an option for me. Growing up in Sissonville, I’d seen too much. Through my love of literature, I’d read too much. Even early on, I’d learned and experienced far too much to ever feel disconnected from the Struggle—both personal and collective. So, again and again, I choose to serve.
While working at The Parthenon, Marshall’s student newspaper, I began writing a series called “Homeless in Huntington” which sought to share the stories of local individuals experiencing homelessness—unfiltered and without applying some pseudo-moralist lens. Understandably, many of the individuals in the local homeless community were inherently suspicious and distrustful of a twenty-something college student carrying a notebook and a small recording device and anxiously asking too many questions. I learned quickly that I had to make myself a part of the community to truly serve and to tell its stories.
I began to hang out with the folks below the balcony of my apartment building. I gave away jackets and gloves and blankets and whatever else I had. I offered my apartment for showers and quick meals and hours of rest from the freezing weather. I shared cold beers and long nights waiting for nothing, comforted only by the presence of each other. With time, I made many honest and loyal friends.
In one story from this time, I wrote:
“But I also realize the sick game being played on all of us. How lucky we are to be tenants wrestling with poverty ourselves; how unfortunate—how cruel—to be forced into the groups which tell stories and laugh and wait for leftovers beneath our balconies (…) I know that we all—the tenants, the individuals, the groups—are what Hemingway called ‘Have-Nots.’ Not in a shameful way, but in a matter-of-fact way. We just don’t have much of anything, at least not materially. The bottom 50% of our country—the wealthiest in the history of the world—own barely more than 1% of the national wealth. Knowing this, I am unable to separate myself from the individuals who live beneath me; We are connected by shared struggles, through class solidarity. I know I always have been and perhaps always will be infinitely closer to sudden homelessness than to extravagant riches. That could be any of us down there, I remind myself. And so it goes…”
And so it continues to go.
A friend of mine named Herb with whom I shared many long nights beneath those balconies in Huntington helped me to learn a lesson I will always carry with me—a lesson I had only read about before in supposedly fictional books, but which I had yet been able to materialize through face-to-face interaction. Herb showed me repeatedly what Bukowski had written once: “You begin saving the world by saving one person at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.”
This is not me taking credit for “saving” Herb, or anything like that. I did not. I will tell you that he saved himself—with a little help from his friends. Herb will tell you that it was his determined cousin and a few kindhearted boys from Recovery Point who did that. I’m not even sure what it means to “save” another person, but by my closest estimation, to save someone means something along the lines of to continue giving hope—unconditionally—to someone with a million other reasons to have none. I hope that’s what I did for Herb and the countless other folks I was fortunate enough to share time with in Huntington—and I know that’s what they did for me.
Like most of us, I learned hard and fast that no politician—or anyone else, for that matter—is coming to “save” the folks in our communities who—often by little or no fault of their own—need “saving.” My experiences up to now have led me to believe that, if anyone, the ones who can save the world are the folks who are constantly willing, day-after-day, to do the exhausting and often-unacknowledged work of saving each other—one person at a time. These are the people who move mountains through utter willpower, hard work and faith in the power of community, the power of solidarity. These are the sort of people working on Mustard Seed Mountain and whose stories we will do our best to share in our paper.
Another way to think of saving one another was elaborated eloquently by Dorothy Day, who said: “The greatest challenge of the day is how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us.”
I’m not so naïve to believe that every column we write and each story we share through Mustard Seed Mountain will “save” someone in our community. But I know more than anything that every revolution of heart that our words inspire will be worth it and then some.
Let’s get to work!
