The Clinton campaign was heavily pushing this video yesterday.
It will tug at your heart strings.
Watch, and then I have a very few comments.
Hillary has always been concerned with children’s issues and women’s issues. We know that.
As the husband of a cancer survivor, one who has just again completed a round of chemo with all the attendant side affects, I know the importance of support, not just from immediate family but from others. Every offer of support matters when it is very hard. We have been lucky in how considerate her employer and fellow workers have been, and even the women who make her special drink at our local Starbucks who always ask how she’s doing. As an ordinary person to be affirmed as Janelle was is very empowering.
Here’s the thing. Despite the brouhaha over Hillary’s remarks about “basket of deplorables,” she does not dismiss such people. Those who know her and anyone who watches her over time knows that she responds to the needs of each individual human she encounters, regardless of that person’s race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, or political persuasion.
Perhaps as a Quaker that is part of what appeals so strongly to me. George Fox wrote about walking gladly across the earth answering that of God in each person we encounter. That could to a large degree be a description of the life, public and private, of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
There has been no one in my memory who has been demonized so long by so many, yet every day gets up determined to fulfill her own spiritual touchstone derived from her Methodist faith. People attribute a different form of her statement to John Wesley, the Founder (along with his brother Charles) of Methodism, although it as far as I know it cannot be found in his writings:
‘Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can.
Hillary offered a variant of that as what she learned from her mother Dorothy Rodham:
Do all the good you can, for all the people you can, in all the ways you can, as long as ever you can.
Many commit to doing good for people, but lose sight of the persons. Some can see and respond to the real need in the person, but lose sight of the broader idea — that person is but one of many.
All humans has their failings, and politicians are not exempt.
Despite hers, one thing remarkable about Hillary is that she can simultaneously see the individual person and address the larger issue. They are parts of a whole.
To me, that is how you can best “answer that of God” in each person.
Which is why, on this First Day as we Friends say, I decided to share and comment upon this video
Peace. And Walk Gladly Across the Earth . . . .