January 24, 2025 • 56 mins
In this episode, Tim Shriver discusses the power of dignity and building an inclusive world. Tim shares his experiences working with the Special Olympics, highlighting how the athletes embody resilience and hope, often thriving in the face of adversity. He also delves into the significance of inclusivity and how it can transform our communities, encouraging us to see the inherent dignity in every individual, regardless of their abilities or circumstances.
Key Takeaways:
- Explore the benefits of building inclusive communities for a happier and more connected society
- Embrace the impact of intellectual disabilities on families and gain a deeper understanding of their experiences
- Navigate mental health and addiction recovery with valuable insights and support for a more empathetic approach
- Learn effective strategies for fostering dignity and respect, creating a more inclusive and supportive environment for all
- Understand the crucial role of relationships in personal happiness and well-being, and how to nurture them within your community
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Speaker 2 (01:23):
We need kind of like a consumptive pyramid of how
much toxic news we can tolerate. Maybe it's good to
know some of what's going on in the world of
politics where people are yelling at each other, or some
of what's going on in the world of culture where
people are yelling at each other. But if you eat
too much of that, it's going to poison you.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Wow, welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great
thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have,
quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what
you think, ring true. And yet for many of us,
our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
(02:07):
self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
have instead of what we do. We think things that
hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
(02:28):
the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
What if the way we approach change, both in others
and in ourselves is all wrong. What if instead of criticism,
we learn to lead with compassion. Tim Shriver, a lifelong
advocate for inclusion and dignity, shared something with me that
stopped me in my tracks. Oppositional energy creates oppositional energy,
(02:55):
simple yet profound. Think about it. How often do we
try to force change only to meet resistance. In today's episode,
we explore how seeing the world through the lens of
the Special Olympics transformed Tim's understanding of humanity. We'll dive
into stories of profound resilience, the hidden gifts of those
often overlooked, and how feeding the good wolf in ourselves
(03:18):
might be the key to creating a better world for everyone.
I'll also share a moment where I stumbled, Yes, I
accidentally compared people to octopuses or is that OCTOPI I'm
not sure, but it taught me something deeper about perspective, humor,
and grace. By the end of this episode, you'll walk
away inspire to see people and yourself in a whole
(03:38):
new way. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is the one
you feed. It's time to feed the good wolf. Hi, Tim,
Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
Thank you. Delighted to be with you and your wolves.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Yes, it's a real pleasure to talk to you. As
I dove deeper into your work, I liked you and
your ideas more and more and more.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
So that's nice. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Think there's a lot of great stuff to talk about here,
but we'll start in the way we normally do, which
is with the parable. There's a grandparent who's talking with
their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two
wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One
is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and
bravery and love, and the other's a bad wolf, which
represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the
(04:22):
grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They
look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which
one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed.
So I'd like to know what that parable means to
you in your life and in the work that you do.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Well. I mean, first of all, I think it's a
beautiful story. It has this quality of intimacy when you
think about this child and this elder wondering and thinking
about these questions together, the goodness and the evil in
the world, how we prevail, how we make decisions. So
I think it's a beautiful parable. You know, when I've
(05:00):
heard it in recent years, Eric, it's always reminded me
that the good wolf within us feels malnourished. You know,
I've worked in the Special Olympics movement for basically all
my life, in one way or another, as a teacher.
For a good part of my life. I feel like
I've had a front row seat for people who are
just doing beautiful work, just giving of themselves, full of compassion, zeal, energy,
(05:25):
a determination to change the world in the most hopeful
and positive of ways. So I feel like the good
wolf in me has been fed at a banquet. But
I look around me and I talk to people, my children,
you know, my friends, people I know and care about.
They feel so discouraged and so beaten down by the
incoming messages and the culture. And I think that, you know,
(05:49):
if I were extending this metaphor, I would say the
evil wolf, the bad wolf, is stuffed to being engorged
almost with food, overfed, and the good wolf is sort
of over in the corner, starving for food. And I
think it's just an invitation for us to remember that
we have the good wolf within us, and that feeding it,
(06:11):
both for ourselves and for others, is a recipe for
changing the course of the future.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
I love that idea, and I think there is a
real need for all of us to think about what
we are feeding ourselves. I mean, obviously food is one thing,
but if you are what you eat, in many ways,
you are what you see and what's around you. And
if we don't make an effort to look for the
(06:38):
hopeful side of things, we don't see it. It's tacked
on to like a two minute thing at the end
of fifty eight minutes of awful news. Yeah, you get
the two minute, cute little story. And I've just found
for myself I have to actively seek that out on
a regular basis in order to feed that good wolf,
because it's not what shows up at the top.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Yeah. Yeah, I think you know you're pointing out this
issue of like managing our incoming, like we manage our calories,
or we manage our salt or our sugar, we manage
our fats or our meats or whatever. We think of
that sort of intuitively. This is what we do for ourselves,
is what we do for our children. Don't eat too
much of this, don't drink too much of that. But
we're increasingly in a moment in which we are coming
(07:22):
to realize we also have to manage what we consume
at the level of our minds and our hearts. We
have to actually manage it the same way we'd manage calories,
or the same way we'd manage fats or sugars or whatever.
I met this teacher once and she said, you know,
she's so positive, so positive, bubbly, enthusiastic, tall, she's a
special education teacher. And I said, well, how do you
stay so positive? She said, I get up in the morning,
(07:44):
ath you said at four thirty, and I have changed
the last year. I don't let anything into my heart,
into my mind through my phone that feels like a
toxin to me. I do my exercise, I read my
meditations and prayers, things like that. I don't let anything
else in. And most of us don't think that way.
(08:05):
We think, well, let's click on this, and let's click
on that. We don't think it's poisoning us.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Yeah, I think that's a key.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Is poisoning us.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Yeah, So we've got a whole new challenge, Like you
know that food pyramid that we used to see, uh
in schools and stuff with you know, this much carbohydrates
and this much fast as much we need, kind of
like a consumptive pyramid of how much toxic news we
can tolerate. Like maybe it's good to know some of
what's going on in the world of politics where people
(08:36):
are yelling at each other, or some of what's going
on in the world of culture where people are yelling
at each other, or maybe we need to know some
of that. But if you eat too much of that,
it's going to poison you. Yeah. Yeah. You need something
that's going to remind you that there is peace within you,
that there is a wholeness out there in the world,
that there are people filled with compassion. That's what I'm
trying to do with Need a Lift, you know, which
(08:57):
is the podcast I've been working on the last several months.
I'm way behind you, but trying to we are aligned,
you know, And what I'm looking for is people who
are looking at situations where there's pain and bringing purpose,
looking at situations where there's despair and bringing hope, looking
at situations where it looks like things are overwhelming. But
(09:18):
these are people who are finding the inner resolve, Like
their inner life is strong. You know, they've found a
spiritual kind of or an emotional foundation that allows them
to navigate hard incoming negativity and transform it into something
hopeful and you know, devoid of hatred and contempt. So look,
(09:41):
I agree with you. We need a lot more attention
to what we consume through our minds and our hearts,
and we need a lot more attention to identifying those
people who will inspire our minds and our hearts to
believe in ourselves and in each other.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Yeah, you say, somewhere, I found myself over and over again,
confused by the strength of people who seem to be
experiencing both pain and triumph at the same time. Say
more about that.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
Well, I think one of the riddles of people who
have the good wolf well fed is that it often
gets fed in moments of turmoil, in moments of stress.
You know, there's the line from one of the spiritual
teachers this say, is you know, no great spiritual progress
is made in times of comfort. So many of the
people I've had the privilege I meet moms, for instance,
(10:35):
who have children, let's say, with down syndrome, who were
told from the moment of birth, your child doesn't matter,
your child's going to be a burden. Your child isn't
going to be able to make you proud, you know,
to have friends, to go to school, to learn to read.
All these messages that these moms and dads are bombarded with.
(10:56):
And I come into their lives, and what do I see?
I see this youth ouge smile. I see this endless optimism.
I see this kind of almost invulnerable hopefulness, like nothing
can beat them up, Like you can't say anything that
would sap their spirit of its energy. So I wonder,
(11:17):
you know, that's a strength that's been refined in a
fire of difficult and challenging and often oppositional energy. But
they come out of it. Many times, not everybody, you know,
and many of us have these experiences in small ways,
and we get bitter and angry, yeah, and resentful, And
we all do that. I mean I do it when
(11:38):
we see people who have had these experiences and come
out of them seemingly with hearts that are almost exploding
with love. I think to myself, Man, I'm in the
presence of greatness, you know. And it may just be
a mom with a eight year old little daughter who has,
you know, down syndrome, bringing her to a fifty meters dash,
But man, does she radiate the kind of energy I
(12:01):
want to live in.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
It's so interesting what you're describing there. And I've heard
you talk elsewhere about you know, one of the things
that the Special Olympics, doing all that work taught you
was to look at people from a different angle than
the one we societally normally do. And this is a
crazy analogy I'm about to make here, but you're talking
about a type of capacity in these people that reminds
(12:25):
me of when I think about octopuses. And what I
mean by that is they have an intelligence that is
so different than ours that is just fascinating. They can
make their skin change color instantly. I mean, I could
go on and on about them, but it's this completely
different type of capacity, and I think what I've gotten
(12:47):
from your work is learning to see that capacity in
people who may have intellectual disabilities or other types. There's
a quality of heart that could be found there that
a lot of us that are going about our day
and our you know, quote unquote more normal may not
have as much.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Of Yeah, I think you know the irony. I think
you're right. I'm not sure about how octopuses work, so
I'm going to I'm going to let your listeners figure
out how to google ad and figure out where that lands.
But it makes sense to me. And this is often
the tragedy that people who have experienced great rejection developed
the capacity for great acceptance. You know, what is the
(13:26):
unique gift that people with intellectual differences often bring to
the table. It's their common experience of having been often rejected.
And again that's not a good thing, that's a horrible thing,
but it often has nurtured in them a kind of
a tenderness and a gentleness and openness to people that
(13:48):
they themselves might not have experienced from others, but that
they themselves develop and give back to others. You know,
there's a quality in people aria I would say, you know,
in the good wolf side of us, maybe we all
have it at some level that just kind of doesn't
hold our weaknesses against us. I would say, if you
go to a special Olympics event, there's not a single
(14:10):
person in the crowd who hasn't at some level discriminated
against people with intellectual disability. Right. I mean literally everybody
there has in the back and sometimes very much in
the front of their mind, thought, these people are too different.
I can't hire them. I don't want to live with them.
I don't want one of them in my family. I
don't want them in my child school. Maybe they haven't
(14:32):
said it, but they felt it, and the Special Olympics
athletes know they felt it. And yet when they look
across at the person in the stands, or at the
persons serving water at the finished line, or the person
helping to line the field, our athletes just seem to
have the capacity to go, I get it, but I'm
still okay with you. I'm still going to give you
(14:53):
a hug. Yeah. And that's not restricted to people with
intellectual challenges, for sure. But that quality, which I've learned
in many ways from them, I believe to be central
to feeding the good wolf. I believe that when the
good wolf is fed, that part of us has this
big capacity not to give people a pass when they
(15:15):
make mistakes, but to kind of let them know that
we get it to maybe challenge them, if they've made
a mistake, to change without hatred, without acrimy, without name calling,
without brutality, without a vicious need to humiliate the mistake maker,
but instead kind of with an open, welcoming sense in
(15:38):
which here we are, now, this is your chance to
grow through what you've just done or experienced. You know
where we're really good as a culture at calling people out.
We're not so good at helping people change and finding
ways to rehability people. We're good at throwing people in jail,
you know, emotional jail, physical jail. We're not very good
(16:00):
at helping people come back. In my view, this Special
Olympics community is really good at helping people rehabilitate so.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
They would get over an idiotic podcast host comparative octopuses.
You don't have to worry about it.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
No one's good. I mean, it's a good point. Yeah,
but I mean, seriously, let's just say, let's just say
you'd made a big blunder here. You'd said something and
you thought, oh my god, I can't believe I said that, which,
of course everyone has done that, right, I've done it
a million times. I'm like, oh, No, I can't believe
I just said that. You know, it's special Olympics.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
You know, everybody's like, yeah, I don't worry about it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
Yeah, And you know there's there's a part of us
this is no, no, no, they Garrek made that terrible
analogy to an octopus. He should be shown at the
door and should be told and you should boycott his
you know whatever, make it up. You know our athletes
are not Yeah, I don't think that's going to work. Yeah. Yeah,
I'm not showing anybody the door. I'm inviting him to
the next race.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
Yeah, it's beautiful. And I think you're talking about how
we have a tency to call people out. I think
that there's a thing that's been on my mind a
lot ever since me too really got a lot of energy,
but in general, and we talk about cancel culture. And
I've thought about this since I was twenty five years old,
(17:16):
and you know, starting to recover from heroin addiction is like,
what does it mean to get a second chance? When
do we say, hey, that person learned from that thing
and they changed. They like you said, they're rehabilitated in
some way. And I think that's a really tricky thing
to figure out in individuals, in our own lives, but
(17:37):
also culturally, it's very difficult to sort that out. And
I think as a culture we're starting to reckon with
that idea a little bit more.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
Yeah, I mean, I'm curious because you've went through the
experiences you've gone through, and the addiction and the bottoming out,
I guess is the right way to put it. But
you use your own language experiences. Do you think those
experiences have made you more capable of seeing through the
weaknesses and others or beyond the mistakes that others make?
(18:07):
If I made some terrible gaff on this show, are you,
because of your own journey less likely? Then you might
otherwise have been to say, God, that guy was a disaster, Jesus,
get him away from me.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
I think so, you know, we all have natural capacities,
and I think one of my natural capacities is to
try and see and understand the backstory of anyone and
the belief that what people do make sense to them,
So why does that make sense to them? But absolutely,
if you screw up as often as I screwed up,
(18:39):
and you know, was a homeless criminal, you know, and
just an active, outright criminal to fund my habit. Yeah,
I think there is a certain amount of learning to
forgive yourself, which I think translates into learning to forgive
others or at least understand others. So yeah, I think
I don't know who I'd be if I didn't have
that experience, because it's unfathomable. But yes, I think that
(19:02):
is an element that is really important, is when we
can forgive ourselves. I think there's some synergy and it
goes both directions. You know, learning to be kinder to
ourselves helps us be kinder to others. But I also
think learning to be kinder to others can sometimes translate
back to learning to be kinder to ourselves, a bi
directional relationship, I think.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Yeah. One of the guests on Nita Leff just required
a conversation with her yesterday, Reverend angel Kyoto Williams, you
know who grew up had a dad as a firefighter,
wonderful parent, but also had a caregiver who abused her
as a little girl. And she was describing to me
the experience of the abuser and of her dad and
(19:44):
her dad's inability to protect her, and she described it
all as sort of seeing in them a certain helplessness
seeing that they were caught in a web of experiences
that they themselves couldn't get out of at the time.
It doesn't excuse the abuse. The abuse was destructive and painful,
(20:08):
but she saw a little bit more of their backstory yep,
than just their mistakes. Yeah, and you know, there's this
tension I think, you know, whenever we talk this way,
it's like, wait a second, are you saying that it's
okay to abuse people and not have the met to movement? No,
I'm not saying that. Are you saying it's okay to
be you know, in some ways abusive of people with
(20:31):
intellectual disabilities or race or culture or gender or whatever. No,
it's not okay. But if we want to heal those wounds,
if we want to stop that kind of abuse, how
we go about doing it is not necessarily clear. I
don't think and just saying hey, Eric, you are terrible,
(20:52):
You are a criminal, you are a heroin auty. I mean,
at the end of the day, that doesn't bring anybody
to recovery.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
It doesn't because I think this is a very nuanced
area that we don't really know how to do, because
it's variable on people is this idea of when you
tend to come at someone right with criticism, that person
is almost always going to get defensive right and defend themselves.
(21:19):
You see this with alcoholics and addicts all the time.
If somebody is just riding them to get into recovery,
they're having to justify to the other person why they
do what they do, which is justifying it to themselves
in some way. You leave somebody in an addiction with
a little bit more space. Most of those people know
there's a real problem, right, but they won't admit it
(21:42):
to anybody else if the admittance is, you know, being
attacked and shamed and all that. And yet at the
same time, when you have somebody who's in active addiction
like that, you don't pretend nothing's happening, you know. I
talk to families a lot, and I've gone through this
with people I love who've been in an addiction. What
what's the right way to late to somebody who's an
active addiction?
Speaker 2 (22:02):
You know?
Speaker 1 (22:02):
The tough Love movement I think missed a lot of things.
It got some things right, but I think it missed
some things.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
You know. I was talking to a friend of mine
who works in the addiction space. And she put it
this way, she said, you know, whether we're dealing with
addiction or whether we're just dealing with our brothers and sisters,
or our spouses or whatever, oppositional energy creates oppositional energy.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
That's a great phrase.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
It's pretty simple. If I say to you, Eric, why
the hell are you wearing your hair that way, You're
likely to say, well, you know, because you and it
just become indignant, you know, like it's just oppositional energy
creates oppositional energy. And you know, threatening energy creates defensive energy.
It's it's just almost inevitable. You treat someone with contempt,
(22:49):
you create an almost immediate and almost impulsively irresistible desire
for revenge. Yep. So you know, if you want to
disintermediate the problem that's causing the addiction or the abuse
of women or children or anybody else, it's unlikely to
work if all we do is name and shame and
(23:11):
humiliate the person who's Again, it's hard to say this
because people that have done abusive and horrible things, you know,
the impulses we got to name and shame and humiliate
them because we got to get them to stop. And
I get it. I'm just not sure we have a
very good track record of having that work.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
You nailed it in a phrase. We're not good culturally
at how to rehabilitate people. And part of the problem
is that some people just don't want to be rehabilitated.
Right if the behavior continues to go on, there's no
real choice.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
But yeah, you got to step in. You've got to
create boundaries. You got to put people in jail if
they're violent, you got to put people out of your
life if they're abusive, and all those kinds of things.
But you know, one guy, I was reading this quote
from Pharrell Williams, and I've used it a lot to
try to teach people around dignity issues. Is it goes
on quite a bit at the beginning, but in the
end of the quote he says, even with people I disagree,
(24:24):
I'm wishing them the best. You know, it's okay to
set a boundary to say, hey, look, Eric, you and
I've been friends for twenty years, but what you've been
doing in the last five years I just can't keep.
I've got to create a boundary. We're not going to
talk now. I'm kind of done. But to carry that
boundary with a feeling that I'm hoping for the best
for you on the other side of your life, of
(24:46):
our life, of this friendship that I've ended to me.
That's kind of the spiritual magic. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
I love that. I know someone who has a very
difficult family relationship, and there their mantra has sort of
become innimum contact, maximum sympathy, right, Like it's beautiful, Like
they've just decided that like, to be around that person
is to be abused. So yeah, I need to minimize that,
and yet I can try and keep my heart open
to them as a person, which is really really difficult
(25:15):
to do.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Yeah. I guess my point is, like here we are
on this podcast talking about this that needs to be
a national conversation. Yeah. I think like when we talk
about the good wolf, you know, to the extent we
want to feed the good wolf, that wolf within us
needs some food around this gift, this quality. How do
we set boundaries, stand up for principles, work for justice
(25:38):
by whatever definition we are given to understand justice. How
do we do all that with a lot of empathy
and a lot of love yep, instead of with a
lot of hatred and a lot of revenge. Vindictiveness. That's
a good challenge for us. All.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
Yeah, I saw a clip of you talking and you
said something about when you fight for your principles, add
one additional principle, and that principle is while you fight
for your principles, treat others with dignity. Yeah, and I
love that idea, which is really good. You're part of
something else called the Dignity Index. Can you share a
(26:16):
little bit about.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
What that is? Yeah. The Dignity Index is a little
tool we created. My colleagues Tom Rosshirt and Tammy Pifer
created this tool that allows us to score the language
we use when we characterize people with whom we disagree.
So it's basically, if you and I, Eric, let's say
we don't agree on pick anythought the border. You want
to have open borders and I want to build a wall,
(26:38):
so we disagree. The Dignity Index would let us score
how I treat you, not how I treat the issue,
how I treat you. Do I call you a name,
do I consider you to be evil? Do I characterize
you as inferior to me, as stupid, as uninformed, as selfish?
Or do I go even farther and say your position
(27:01):
is so dangerous that you don't actually deserve to live.
You need to be that's the language of war. Or
do I go up the side of dignity and do
I say, you know, Eric, you've got a position. I
got a position that that would be kind of an
equal time we each need a chance to Or do
I go to the top of the dignity scale, which
is an eight, which is you and I don't agree,
(27:22):
but I will never violate your Eric, your dignity under
no circumstances, no matter how much we disagree, I will
always do my best to make sure you know your
dignity is intact around me so we can score you. Now,
it's objective. It's not like a Trump voter scoring Kamala Harris,
or a Kamala Harris voter scoring a Trump voter, or
(27:43):
somebody trying to catch a Senator this or Minister that
in a mistake. It's it's just an objective score and
it's pretty reliable. It doesn't matter whether you're right or left,
or you know, rich or poor, or black or white
or straight or single or whatever. You can score pretty objectively.
And what's been so exciting about it, Eric, is that
when people learn it. You can learn it in ten minutes.
(28:05):
It's not like complicated. It's a pretty simple scoring tool.
When you learn it, you start to have what we
call the mirror effect. You start to see yourself. So
instead of saying, hey, look, Eric, he's done all this
bad language. He's like a three on this or a
two on that or six on I start to see, hey,
you know what, tim is a two? Like I just
(28:26):
use two language when I was talking about my cousin.
I can do better than that, you know. And you
start to realize that how you treat someone is very
central to whether or not your ideas prevail, because when
you treat someone with contempt, you make an enemy for
your cause. So if I want to argue to you,
we got to build a wall. We got to build
(28:46):
a wall, you idiot, I've immediately made you into an
enemy of the wall, right as opposed to winning you over,
because I think I'm winning you over by calling you
a name. But you know, all you have to do
is let people stand back and watch and they go
of course, that's not going to work.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
There's the relationship expert John Gottman, who's been around a
long time and I'm familiar with his work a little bit.
I don't know it a lot. Yeah, I think he
had like you know, the four horsemen of like the
relationship Apocalypse or something right, and one of them was
certainly contempt.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
It destroys.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
Yeah, it's cancer to our relationship.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
It totally is.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
And it's cancer to a culture, as it turns out,
and sadly, you know, when we look at the data,
we are living in a culture that normalizes treating other
people with contempt when you disagree with them, instead of
a culture that penalizes people for treating people with contempt
when they disagree, we reward them, yes, so we create
(29:45):
this vicious cycle of incentives to be more and more
contemptuous instead of the alternate sycle. This is why I
say the evil wolf or the bad wolf is overfed
and the good wolf is emaciated. When I get likes
and I get popular, and I get more power and
attention by being contemptuous, then you've created all the wrong
(30:09):
incentives for the good wolf.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
It's really true, and it's really hard to resist that
if you're someone who's trying to get attention in the
public eye a little bit, right, Like you know, I
want people to listen to the podcast. So I'm trying
to get attention, and there are ways to do it
that would be much more effective, knowing what we know
(30:31):
about the algorithms. And it's a difficult temptation to resist.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
It is it is, And that's why we need subcultures
that create a counter incentive where and I think this
is you know what you're trying to do. You're creating
a listener community. I'm trying to join you at your
listener community, invite you to join mine. Small cultures maybe
there's five thousand, maybe there's twenty five thousand, maybe there's
one hundred thousand, yep, And they create s upcultures of
(30:55):
people who go, wait a second, that's the world I
want to live. And I want to live in a
world where my ideas are explored, where people I agree
with or listen to, where people I disagree with or
better understood, where we come to solutions that actually work,
that we can implement, that we can solve our problems
for ourselves and our families and our community. Like I
want to live in that world. I don't want to
live in that other world. So I'm going to opt
(31:16):
for Eric's podcast as part of my community. It's not
going to be the same as the one hundred million
likes you'd get if you know, called someone by the
most officious names possible.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
Compared them to an octopus or something.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
Yeah. Now, but you know, these things change over time.
Human beings, we create cultures, we change them. I think
we're at a point where millions and millions of Americans
want to change. They just don't know how to do it.
They don't know where to look. And thank god, some
of them are looking to you.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
Yeah, let's change direction a little bit. I want to
talk about something that you explored a little bit in
your memoir for listeners who don't know your background. Right,
you're part of the Kennedy Shreiver family. You're part of
a very well known, very successful, very ambitious family, and
you talked about when you were younger the pressures you
(32:07):
felt to actually measure up in that family. And you
also talked about how to sort out your accomplishments, you know,
feeling like maybe they're just because you were, you know,
related to the Kennedys. Now that I think your memoir
was twenty fourteen, which means you probably wrote the book
in something like twenty twelve. It's twelve years later, thirteen
(32:29):
years later, Where do you stand with that today? Talk
to me about, you know, sort of how you worked
through that and any evolution that's happened in you sort
of sense the memoir.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Yeah, well, thanks for taking a look at it. That book,
Fully Alive was my attempt to do kind of three
different things. One is tell the story of the athletes
of Special Olympics and the effect they've had on changing
my life. The other was to tell the story of
how my family, largely my mother and her siblings, contributed
to creating a movement around and unlocking the gifts of
(33:02):
people with intellectual disabilities. And the other was to tell
my story. I'd say on all three fronts, I feel
a good deal of I guess what I would say
is I felt like I got a lot of head
nodding when I talked about that book. When I talked
to people about the gifts of people with intellectual disabilities
and how they in effect taught me the gift of
how to be free to be myself, people go, oh, oh, yeah,
(33:26):
I've been to a specially I know what you mean.
I know what you mean. What I did learn is
that's not a gift you learn as an idea. That's
a gift you practice as an experience. Right, So I
go back. You know, our local Special Olympics Unified basketball
program starts in two weeks, second week in January. I
can't wait for the Saturday. It's the same way. If
you know, some people look forward to going to the gym,
(33:48):
you know, practice building up their abs or their shoulders
or whatever they're building up. I look forward to going
to the Special Olympics practices to building up my sense
of my own freedom and my own dignity, and to
learn from those athletes. I'd say it with respect to
the story of my family, you know, President Kennedy, my
uncles Teddy and Bobby, my mom, my grandparents. I feel
(34:11):
proud that at least some people know that a good
part of that family history is not just about political success.
It's about the tenderness and heart that was infused in
that family system by my aunt Rosemary. She's the missing
piece in most of the stories that people tell about
(34:31):
President Kennedy and about my uncle Bobby and my uncle
ted and so on. They tell the story of big
legislation and speeches and dramatic events and tragedies. But I'm
glad that at least somewhere in the record Rosemary's role
is remembered or at least has been shared.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
I loved that part of the book because I actually
do know a little bit about Rosemary, because President Kennedy
was part of a big movement to sort of shut
down the big institutions implement community mental health. And we
could debate a long time whether that was a good
move or a bad move.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
It was a good move, but anyway, go ahead, Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
Well, well, Lesley, Yeah, that's certainly something we could debate.
I think in principle it's a good move. I think
the follow up to it that was supposed to happen
did not happen, which created a crisis. Anyway, my point being,
I've heard about Rosemary a little bit in that context,
but I loved hearing more about her. Maybe you could
just share a couple minutes of her story and a
(35:30):
little bit about your sort of thesis that the tenderness
and the kindness that the Kennedys have came from interacting
with her.
Speaker 2 (35:38):
Yeah, well, you've got it. I mean, my mom was
one of nine children, my grandparents, my grandfather was very
successful in business in the twenties and thirties and forties
and up into the fifties. He's made a huge fortune
by those standards. Those did not, you know, by today's standards.
I suppose it's only a modest fortune. But still he
made a lot of money. And he and my grandmother
(35:59):
are well known for their three sons, Jack who became
the President of the United States, and my uncle Robert
Francis Kennedy became senator from New York and Attorney General,
and my uncle Ted Kennedy became center from Massachusetts. That's
the story. That's the narrative, rich patriarch, big Irish Catholic family,
three gigantically successful boys, and then you have the tragedies
(36:21):
of the murders and so on. What's missing in that
story is the birth of Rosemary Kennedy, who, unlike all
of her eight brothers and sisters, had an intellectual disability.
And in nineteen twenties America, a wealthy family with a
child with intellectual disability sent that child to an institution.
That was the end of it. Doctors would have said,
give up the child, pretend like you did nothing happen,
(36:44):
go home. Take care of your other children. This child
will be taken care of well somewhere else. Just move on,
And they chose to keep her at home. So each
of Rosemary's siblings, including my mom, grew up looking across
the table at a sister who had no school to
go to, who had no friends, who had no childcare program,
(37:05):
who had no doctor, who had no recreation program, who
had no summer camp. And my view is that my
grandmother and my grandfather, in keeping her at home, taught
her siblings that they had to be able to see
what the world didn't see. The world saw Rosemary as
a zero. They knew she was beautiful, they knew she
(37:28):
was funny, they knew she was gifted. So they learned
to see what the world couldn't see. They learned to
see human dignity where the world saw human nothingness. Yeah,
so they didn't talk about it a lot. But my
view is that when President Kennedy gets up at his
inauguration and says, you know, ask what you can do
for your country, it's because he knew that when people
(37:49):
are asked to give of themselves that they get their
best selves in return.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
He knew it, like he'd done it his whole life
with his own sister.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
Every time he was asked to take care of Rosemary,
to include Rosemary, to take her with you, he knew
it was to his benefit that he had this beautiful sister.
So at some level, the lessons that my uncle Bobby
taught that my mom, who you know, started this camp
for children with special needs in her own backyard. I
mean nineteen sixty two. She had like the four phone
(38:19):
calls in the spring. You know, her brother was the president.
She was working on trying to policy change. And the
fourth mother called her and said, you know, missus driver,
there's nowhere for me to take my child. None of
the camps will take my child. And she said, yes,
there is. You bring your child in my house. I
damn it, you bring your child here. There is going
to be a summer camp. It's going to be in
(38:39):
my backyard. Now where does she get that resolve? That
fire that you know? Where did that heartfire burn from?
It burned from knowing her sister deserved those chances and
didn't get them, and she wasn't. She couldn't tolerate having
another mother tell her there was nothing. So I kind
of feel like the hidden spiritual energy in that family.
And you know, I'm not saying to lionize my mom
(39:02):
or her brothers and sisters politically. I'm saying that, you know,
a lot of people come up to me still, you know,
President Kennedy's been gone sixty plus years. They still come up, Oh,
I so admire your uncle. I so you know when
he was president, or your uncle Bobby. He's my roma,
you know. And I think what they're telling me is
there was something in those boys in that generation. There
(39:25):
was some quality in them. And when I think about
what that quality was, it was Rosemary's heart beating through them.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
It's a really beautiful idea, and it makes a lot
of sense in that we are deeply shaped by the
experiences that we have, and we're deeply shaped by what
we're taught about how to handle those experiences. And it
seems pretty clear that that generation of Kennedy's was taught
(39:53):
to treat her with dignity, to treat her with respect.
And they also, like you said, they got to see
her who she was.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
They got to see her the world couldn't see her. So,
you know, if you're a political leader and you're trying
to say, hey, our country. You know, we're talking about
the cycle of contempt right now. I mean I want
to be able to say, hey, gang, which is what
you're saying. Don't you see you've got a good wolf?
Come on? I know you do. You know this because
of your own life. You know, even in the depths
(40:22):
of your own despair, there was something in you that
was still there, that wanted to be healthy and strong
and contributing and compassionate and good to yourself. You know
it was there, right. I don't have to explain it
to you. I have to read a book about it.
You don't need a lesson plan to unpack it. You
know it. So when you speak to an audience, or
when you're speaking to your audience here on this podcast,
(40:44):
you're telling me, I know you've got it in you.
Come on, I know you've got it. Don't trust me,
You've got it. And that's what I think my uncles did.
They said to the country at a time, at different
times when it needed to hear it. Hey, America, you
can do this. We can take on civil rights. We
can work to create extend healthcare. We can build a
(41:04):
more peaceful future. We can volunteer and create connections to
people all over the planet in service a piece.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
I know we can do this.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
So they knew at some level to trust their gut
on these things, and not just to trust the polls,
and not just to trust what people ask of their government.
Most of the political rhetoric we hear nowadays is all
about like, is the government delivering for people what they want?
It's a very good question, and if it's not, it
needs to be fixed that. There's a second question, which
(41:35):
is our people giving to the country what they can.
And that's just as important. But almost nobody asks it
but my uncles and my mom and her siblings, her sisters.
I think they did ask it, and I think they
asked it because Rosemary told them to. Even though Rosemary
never wrote a book, Rosemary never gave a speech, Rosemary
never started a company, Rosemary never excelled in a test,
(41:58):
Rosemary never won an honor ever, nothing her whole life.
On that, all those measures of success she had nothing.
But on the most important measure of success, did she
inspire the hearts of people that she touched? I think
she gets an A plus plus.
Speaker 1 (42:31):
Let's talk about another idea that runs throughout your work,
which is the idea of inclusiveness. Talk to me about
what inclusiveness means to you. Why is it so important
to you?
Speaker 2 (42:42):
Well, I think, you know, the tendency we have as
human beings is to sort, you know, like good, bad, friend, foe,
you know, tall, short, smart, stupid, all those decisions we make.
And you know, sometimes we're classifying things that are good.
You know, if somebody's six eight, maybe they play center
on the basketball team, and if somebody's five eight, maybe
(43:04):
they play point guard. It might not be the other
way around. So that's all okay. But what happens, I
think is that we slip from sorting in order to
make sense of the world to sorting in order to
create hierarchies in the world. I like you, you're good,
you're desirable, You not so much, and we start to exclude.
(43:25):
And we often exclude by when we judge books by
their cover, when we judge people by blunt instruments. If
you have a low IQ, oh, not desirable. Sorry. The
Special Olympics movement is in two hundred countries. You know,
there's five million athletes volunteers that do out fifty sixty
thousand games a year. Every single one of them is
(43:47):
a rebellion against the tyranny and the brutality of exclusion
and judgment and contempt. And every one of those events,
whether it's a little swimming race or a bowling competition
or a skating competition, or attract me, every one of
them is an invitation to say, when in doubt, when
you have the option, when you have a choice, try
(44:08):
to choose to be inclusive. That's it. Do your best. Yeah,
choose to include. That's the message. The healthcare benefits of
joining a community, of opening yourself to others, So being
a part of civic organizations, religious organizations, political organizations, social
cause organizations. The benefits to our health, to our hearts,
(44:28):
to our brains, to our souls are enormous when we include.
But we have so many messages about who to exclude. Yeah,
you know, don't hang out with those people. I can't.
People say this to me. A lot of my friends
are democrats. I spend a lot of time in Republican
circles working on this dignity work. You met with them,
(44:50):
I met with them. I spent thirty years in special Olympics.
What do you think I am? I mean? I got
the basic message. The basic message is have your heart
open to everyone. So this inclusion message isn't you know.
I think sometimes it gets distorted as a political agenda
or fight between this group and that group. And the
Special Olympics world, inclusion is all about relationships. It's all
(45:14):
about being open to another person. It's not about saying
I'm better than them or they're worse than me, or
I need to force you to let me in or
I need to force you to get me out or whatever.
It's just all about saying, you know, and when I
meet Eric, we come from different places, we wear our
hair differently, we have different stories. Be inclusive if you
can try, just try to listen, try to find the good,
(45:35):
try to see what their gift is. If you find
the gift, celebrate the gift. That's the Speciallympics message. You know,
we have a lot of people who can't use language
to express themselves, who can't necessarily run unassisted when they're
running a race. But in the Special Olympics movement, those
are not the right measures. The measure is meet, train,
(45:56):
play and then find something to celebrate. Because if you
have no words and it took you forty five seconds
to run fifty meters and you work really hard to
do that, and you trained hard, and you have your
coach there with you. I'm telling you, the crowd will
cheer louder, and then they cheer to the final four
because they'll know they're in the presence of a gift.
(46:17):
And it may not be the gift you see when
you watch the NBA or when you watch the Olympics,
but man, is it a gift. It's a beautiful gift.
So maybe that's a long answer, Eric, I'm sorry for that,
but you know, choosing to include is good for us
as human beings. It's good for our physical health, it's
good for our emotional health, and it's certainly good for
(46:38):
you know, I would argue our political health at a
time when our country is really hurting. You know, people
are really scared of each other, and they're threatened by
each other, and they're fearful or fearful of one another.
We're fearful of the future because we're fearful of one another.
We need a little dose of wisdom from the special
Olympics community that just says, hey, you know what, you
(46:59):
don't have to gree on everything, but try it ont
be inclusive, do the best you can try a little
harder if you've tried already, and give it another shot,
because there's something good in that person, you just got
to go find it.
Speaker 1 (47:11):
I've heard you talk about this, and you talk about
this idea of you know, every one of us wants
to be part of a circle that includes a. C. S.
Lewis talked about this, right, like everybody thinks there's like
an inner ring of if you just got into that,
you know, and once you're in that, you know it
never really ends. But you say that this idea of
seeking belonging in that way is backwards. We get the
(47:34):
sense of belonging by giving it. And I think you're
talking about seeing with different eyes and seeing that it's
good to be part of a group, even if it
doesn't have the social status that many of us are
seeking and chasing.
Speaker 2 (47:52):
M h, I mean status. You know that some of
the most insecure people in the world are people who
have the highest social status. Why because they're always and
that they're going to lose it. Yeah, And I mean
I've been very privileged and blessed to be able to
be around people with enormous political and financial power. But
I got to tell you a lot of times they're
(48:13):
not very happy, and a lot of times they're quite
unsettled and insecure about themselves. And you think, why is
this guy he's got a billion dollars? Or why is
that person insecure just came here in as private jet,
or why is she insecure? She's not a cover of
magazine and everybody adores her and admires her. And it's like,
those are not the things that deliver. That's the false
(48:35):
programs of happiness. You know, like, if only I get
a lot of approval, I'll be happy, It doesn't work. Right,
If only I get a lot of control over other people,
I'll be happy, also doesn't work. You know, what works
for happiness is deep, enduring, honest, authentic relationships. That's it.
I mean, the social science will tell us that, religion
(48:55):
tells us that philosophy tells us that that's it. I mean, yeah,
we all need our basics, you know, we need food
and shelter and things like that, and we need to
be in a situation where we're not at risk of
losing food and shelter in these things. But after a
fairly basic security around, you know, basic goods, after we've
achieved a fairly modest level of security. The only thing
(49:17):
that contributes beyond that to happiness is relationships. And it's
not like whether you're the head of the Rotary Club
or the Lions Club, or the Democratic Party or the
church council or whatever it is. It's not that you're
the head of it. It's that you're in it. You
know that you're feeling and seen and understood by other people.
(49:39):
So you know, this is a hard lesson for us
to learn. But stature does not convey happiness. It's kind
of a scientific fact.
Speaker 1 (49:47):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We've only got a few minutes left here,
and there's two things I would love to get through here.
The first is a question that we could spend an
hour on. So I recognize i'm setting myself up, but
people talk about how polarized the country is. I love
history podcast. There's one called The Rest is History. It's
(50:08):
a couple of English guys. It's great, and they're doing
this long series on nineteen sixty eight, which I'm sure
you know is the year that your uncle was assassinated.
Martin Luther King was assassinated. And I'm looking at that
and I'm looking at our current times, and I'm thinking
I keep hearing again and again, this is the worst
it's ever been. I just don't know if that's true.
Speaker 2 (50:31):
What do you think? Well, I go with John Lewis,
who said towards the end of his life, I was
at a speech. He must have said it a million times.
He's in. Anybody who thinks things haven't gotten better hasn't
lived my life. Yep. So, the year I was born
in nineteen fifty nine, there were probably two hundred thousand
Americans living in institutions with intellectual disabilities. Today they're basically
(50:53):
are zero. The year I went to school in nineteen
sixty five or six, there were no children with intellectual disabilities,
and any school in America pretty much except segregated schools. Today,
almost every school, public school in America has children with
intellectual developmental disabilities in the school. That's a big win.
So I'm just looking at it from the point of
view of one group population. I think that you could
(51:15):
say the same thing about black Americans. Yeah, there's a
long way to go on all these things. We don't
shrink from the severity of the challenge by acknowledging the
enormity of the change.
Speaker 1 (51:26):
Yeah, that's a beautiful way to say it.
Speaker 2 (51:28):
Yeah, and our country, I look around, it's more inclusive,
it's more diverse, it's more wealthy, it's more loving. I
mean like when I was a kid, I would never
say I love you to another guy. I barely said
I love you to my own mother. And now I
(51:50):
hear that from friends all the time. My kids when
their friends come over the oh I love you. I
mean you could say that's a small thing. I think
it's a big thing. Yeah. So I think there's a
lot of things. I think the country's more diverse. There's
more attention to mental health than there ever was. There's
more support for a whole diverse way of raising families
(52:11):
that women and men are finding their ways into. So, look,
we've got big challenges. We've got a mental health crisis.
We've got an income inequality crisis. We still have persistent
and almost unforgivable discrimination in our country. We have a
long way to go. But I'd say probably there's a
billion people in the world. I'm just going to say
(52:32):
this because it's a crazy number, but I'm guessing there's
a billion people in the world. If tomorrow you told
them they could move the United States, they'd say yeah
they would. Yeah, maybe two they'd come here in a heartbeat.
Why Because still we do represent an enormously privileged way
of living, enormously privileged type of government. And I got
(52:52):
more than my fair share of complaints about our government.
I got a lot of complaints about a lot of things.
But I don't for a minute let it convince me
that we have that may progress and certainly in my
lifetime I'm with John Lewis, We've moved forward in many,
many ways.
Speaker 1 (53:05):
Yep, I totally agree. All right, last thing, you talk
about a miracle, and I love this. You said a
miracle is not a manipulation of the laws of nature
and history. It can also be a way of describing
a dramatic change of mind and heart at the most
fundamental levels of reality. Say anything you would like to
in close in. But I just think that's such a
(53:26):
beautiful idea.
Speaker 2 (53:27):
Well, I hope it speaks for itself. Because miracles, the
premise is unchanged about who causes them. I think miracles
are a function of how receptive we are to seeing
the infusion of reality with the laws of the spirit,
the laws of the spirit which transcend and are matched
by the laws of nature. They don't disrupt, in my
(53:48):
view of the laws of nature, but they operate alongside them.
So when human beings fall in love, it's a miracle.
They don't think in love, they don't plan in love,
they don't decide in love. They fall. We fall, And
we can fall in love this afternoon with a walk
with a child. We can fall in love with a
(54:08):
tree that's changing colors. We can fall in love with
a chance to see someone in an intensive care unit
being cared for by a nurse with tenderness that's unbounded
by professional training or compensation or rules. We can fall
in love with when the heart overtakes us and reminds
(54:28):
us that we're citizens of yet another dimension of reality.
I guess that's the way i'd put it. We're all
destined for something beautiful, and we come from something beautiful,
and a miracle is when we see it. It's there
all the time. I mean, it's just there all the time.
Speaker 1 (54:44):
Well, that is a beautiful place to wrap up, Tim,
I've really enjoyed this. This has been great. I wish
we had two more hours to go.
Speaker 2 (54:51):
But thank you so much, Eric for thinking and working
and playing around with some of the ideas that have
been living in my head for a long time, and
I'm grateful for the you do and hope that our
efforts that need a lift to kind of create another kind.
Speaker 1 (55:05):
Of pod sister or pod brother of yours that.
Speaker 2 (55:08):
Will compliment what you're doing. And hopefully I had the
voices of people on need a lift contributing to feeding.
Speaker 1 (55:15):
The good wealth. Thank you so much, Tim, Thank you.
Speaker 3 (55:33):
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Now.
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(56:11):
the show.
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Speaker 2 (01:23):
We need kind of like a consumptive pyramid of how
much toxic news we can tolerate. Maybe it's good to
know some of what's going on in the world of
politics where people are yelling at each other, or some
of what's going on in the world of culture where
people are yelling at each other. But if you eat
too much of that, it's going to poison you.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Wow, welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great
thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have,
quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what
you think, ring true. And yet for many of us,
our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
(02:07):
self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
have instead of what we do. We think things that
hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
(02:28):
the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
What if the way we approach change, both in others
and in ourselves is all wrong. What if instead of criticism,
we learn to lead with compassion. Tim Shriver, a lifelong
advocate for inclusion and dignity, shared something with me that
stopped me in my tracks. Oppositional energy creates oppositional energy,
(02:55):
simple yet profound. Think about it. How often do we
try to force change only to meet resistance. In today's episode,
we explore how seeing the world through the lens of
the Special Olympics transformed Tim's understanding of humanity. We'll dive
into stories of profound resilience, the hidden gifts of those
often overlooked, and how feeding the good wolf in ourselves
(03:18):
might be the key to creating a better world for everyone.
I'll also share a moment where I stumbled, Yes, I
accidentally compared people to octopuses or is that OCTOPI I'm
not sure, but it taught me something deeper about perspective, humor,
and grace. By the end of this episode, you'll walk
away inspire to see people and yourself in a whole
(03:38):
new way. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is the one
you feed. It's time to feed the good wolf. Hi, Tim,
Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
Thank you. Delighted to be with you and your wolves.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Yes, it's a real pleasure to talk to you. As
I dove deeper into your work, I liked you and
your ideas more and more and more.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
So that's nice. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Think there's a lot of great stuff to talk about here,
but we'll start in the way we normally do, which
is with the parable. There's a grandparent who's talking with
their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two
wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One
is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and
bravery and love, and the other's a bad wolf, which
represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the
(04:22):
grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They
look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which
one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed.
So I'd like to know what that parable means to
you in your life and in the work that you do.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Well. I mean, first of all, I think it's a
beautiful story. It has this quality of intimacy when you
think about this child and this elder wondering and thinking
about these questions together, the goodness and the evil in
the world, how we prevail, how we make decisions. So
I think it's a beautiful parable. You know, when I've
(05:00):
heard it in recent years, Eric, it's always reminded me
that the good wolf within us feels malnourished. You know,
I've worked in the Special Olympics movement for basically all
my life, in one way or another, as a teacher.
For a good part of my life. I feel like
I've had a front row seat for people who are
just doing beautiful work, just giving of themselves, full of compassion, zeal, energy,
(05:25):
a determination to change the world in the most hopeful
and positive of ways. So I feel like the good
wolf in me has been fed at a banquet. But
I look around me and I talk to people, my children,
you know, my friends, people I know and care about.
They feel so discouraged and so beaten down by the
incoming messages and the culture. And I think that, you know,
(05:49):
if I were extending this metaphor, I would say the
evil wolf, the bad wolf, is stuffed to being engorged
almost with food, overfed, and the good wolf is sort
of over in the corner, starving for food. And I
think it's just an invitation for us to remember that
we have the good wolf within us, and that feeding it,
(06:11):
both for ourselves and for others, is a recipe for
changing the course of the future.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
I love that idea, and I think there is a
real need for all of us to think about what
we are feeding ourselves. I mean, obviously food is one thing,
but if you are what you eat, in many ways,
you are what you see and what's around you. And
if we don't make an effort to look for the
(06:38):
hopeful side of things, we don't see it. It's tacked
on to like a two minute thing at the end
of fifty eight minutes of awful news. Yeah, you get
the two minute, cute little story. And I've just found
for myself I have to actively seek that out on
a regular basis in order to feed that good wolf,
because it's not what shows up at the top.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Yeah. Yeah, I think you know you're pointing out this
issue of like managing our incoming, like we manage our calories,
or we manage our salt or our sugar, we manage
our fats or our meats or whatever. We think of
that sort of intuitively. This is what we do for ourselves,
is what we do for our children. Don't eat too
much of this, don't drink too much of that. But
we're increasingly in a moment in which we are coming
(07:22):
to realize we also have to manage what we consume
at the level of our minds and our hearts. We
have to actually manage it the same way we'd manage calories,
or the same way we'd manage fats or sugars or whatever.
I met this teacher once and she said, you know,
she's so positive, so positive, bubbly, enthusiastic, tall, she's a
special education teacher. And I said, well, how do you
stay so positive? She said, I get up in the morning,
(07:44):
ath you said at four thirty, and I have changed
the last year. I don't let anything into my heart,
into my mind through my phone that feels like a
toxin to me. I do my exercise, I read my
meditations and prayers, things like that. I don't let anything
else in. And most of us don't think that way.
(08:05):
We think, well, let's click on this, and let's click
on that. We don't think it's poisoning us.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Yeah, I think that's a key.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Is poisoning us.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Yeah, So we've got a whole new challenge, Like you
know that food pyramid that we used to see, uh
in schools and stuff with you know, this much carbohydrates
and this much fast as much we need, kind of
like a consumptive pyramid of how much toxic news we
can tolerate. Like maybe it's good to know some of
what's going on in the world of politics where people
(08:36):
are yelling at each other, or some of what's going
on in the world of culture where people are yelling
at each other, or maybe we need to know some
of that. But if you eat too much of that,
it's going to poison you. Yeah. Yeah. You need something
that's going to remind you that there is peace within you,
that there is a wholeness out there in the world,
that there are people filled with compassion. That's what I'm
trying to do with Need a Lift, you know, which
(08:57):
is the podcast I've been working on the last several months.
I'm way behind you, but trying to we are aligned,
you know, And what I'm looking for is people who
are looking at situations where there's pain and bringing purpose,
looking at situations where there's despair and bringing hope, looking
at situations where it looks like things are overwhelming. But
(09:18):
these are people who are finding the inner resolve, Like
their inner life is strong. You know, they've found a
spiritual kind of or an emotional foundation that allows them
to navigate hard incoming negativity and transform it into something
hopeful and you know, devoid of hatred and contempt. So look,
(09:41):
I agree with you. We need a lot more attention
to what we consume through our minds and our hearts,
and we need a lot more attention to identifying those
people who will inspire our minds and our hearts to
believe in ourselves and in each other.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Yeah, you say, somewhere, I found myself over and over again,
confused by the strength of people who seem to be
experiencing both pain and triumph at the same time. Say
more about that.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
Well, I think one of the riddles of people who
have the good wolf well fed is that it often
gets fed in moments of turmoil, in moments of stress.
You know, there's the line from one of the spiritual
teachers this say, is you know, no great spiritual progress
is made in times of comfort. So many of the
people I've had the privilege I meet moms, for instance,
(10:35):
who have children, let's say, with down syndrome, who were
told from the moment of birth, your child doesn't matter,
your child's going to be a burden. Your child isn't
going to be able to make you proud, you know,
to have friends, to go to school, to learn to read.
All these messages that these moms and dads are bombarded with.
(10:56):
And I come into their lives, and what do I see?
I see this youth ouge smile. I see this endless optimism.
I see this kind of almost invulnerable hopefulness, like nothing
can beat them up, Like you can't say anything that
would sap their spirit of its energy. So I wonder,
(11:17):
you know, that's a strength that's been refined in a
fire of difficult and challenging and often oppositional energy. But
they come out of it. Many times, not everybody, you know,
and many of us have these experiences in small ways,
and we get bitter and angry, yeah, and resentful, And
we all do that. I mean I do it when
(11:38):
we see people who have had these experiences and come
out of them seemingly with hearts that are almost exploding
with love. I think to myself, Man, I'm in the
presence of greatness, you know. And it may just be
a mom with a eight year old little daughter who has,
you know, down syndrome, bringing her to a fifty meters dash,
But man, does she radiate the kind of energy I
(12:01):
want to live in.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
It's so interesting what you're describing there. And I've heard
you talk elsewhere about you know, one of the things
that the Special Olympics, doing all that work taught you
was to look at people from a different angle than
the one we societally normally do. And this is a
crazy analogy I'm about to make here, but you're talking
about a type of capacity in these people that reminds
(12:25):
me of when I think about octopuses. And what I
mean by that is they have an intelligence that is
so different than ours that is just fascinating. They can
make their skin change color instantly. I mean, I could
go on and on about them, but it's this completely
different type of capacity, and I think what I've gotten
(12:47):
from your work is learning to see that capacity in
people who may have intellectual disabilities or other types. There's
a quality of heart that could be found there that
a lot of us that are going about our day
and our you know, quote unquote more normal may not
have as much.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Of Yeah, I think you know the irony. I think
you're right. I'm not sure about how octopuses work, so
I'm going to I'm going to let your listeners figure
out how to google ad and figure out where that lands.
But it makes sense to me. And this is often
the tragedy that people who have experienced great rejection developed
the capacity for great acceptance. You know, what is the
(13:26):
unique gift that people with intellectual differences often bring to
the table. It's their common experience of having been often rejected.
And again that's not a good thing, that's a horrible thing,
but it often has nurtured in them a kind of
a tenderness and a gentleness and openness to people that
(13:48):
they themselves might not have experienced from others, but that
they themselves develop and give back to others. You know,
there's a quality in people aria I would say, you know,
in the good wolf side of us, maybe we all
have it at some level that just kind of doesn't
hold our weaknesses against us. I would say, if you
go to a special Olympics event, there's not a single
(14:10):
person in the crowd who hasn't at some level discriminated
against people with intellectual disability. Right. I mean literally everybody
there has in the back and sometimes very much in
the front of their mind, thought, these people are too different.
I can't hire them. I don't want to live with them.
I don't want one of them in my family. I
don't want them in my child school. Maybe they haven't
(14:32):
said it, but they felt it, and the Special Olympics
athletes know they felt it. And yet when they look
across at the person in the stands, or at the
persons serving water at the finished line, or the person
helping to line the field, our athletes just seem to
have the capacity to go, I get it, but I'm
still okay with you. I'm still going to give you
(14:53):
a hug. Yeah. And that's not restricted to people with
intellectual challenges, for sure. But that quality, which I've learned
in many ways from them, I believe to be central
to feeding the good wolf. I believe that when the
good wolf is fed, that part of us has this
big capacity not to give people a pass when they
(15:15):
make mistakes, but to kind of let them know that
we get it to maybe challenge them, if they've made
a mistake, to change without hatred, without acrimy, without name calling,
without brutality, without a vicious need to humiliate the mistake maker,
but instead kind of with an open, welcoming sense in
(15:38):
which here we are, now, this is your chance to
grow through what you've just done or experienced. You know
where we're really good as a culture at calling people out.
We're not so good at helping people change and finding
ways to rehability people. We're good at throwing people in jail,
you know, emotional jail, physical jail. We're not very good
(16:00):
at helping people come back. In my view, this Special
Olympics community is really good at helping people rehabilitate so.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
They would get over an idiotic podcast host comparative octopuses.
You don't have to worry about it.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
No one's good. I mean, it's a good point. Yeah,
but I mean, seriously, let's just say, let's just say
you'd made a big blunder here. You'd said something and
you thought, oh my god, I can't believe I said that, which,
of course everyone has done that, right, I've done it
a million times. I'm like, oh, No, I can't believe
I just said that. You know, it's special Olympics.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
You know, everybody's like, yeah, I don't worry about it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
Yeah, And you know there's there's a part of us
this is no, no, no, they Garrek made that terrible
analogy to an octopus. He should be shown at the
door and should be told and you should boycott his
you know whatever, make it up. You know our athletes
are not Yeah, I don't think that's going to work. Yeah. Yeah,
I'm not showing anybody the door. I'm inviting him to
the next race.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
Yeah, it's beautiful. And I think you're talking about how
we have a tency to call people out. I think
that there's a thing that's been on my mind a
lot ever since me too really got a lot of energy,
but in general, and we talk about cancel culture. And
I've thought about this since I was twenty five years old,
(17:16):
and you know, starting to recover from heroin addiction is like,
what does it mean to get a second chance? When
do we say, hey, that person learned from that thing
and they changed. They like you said, they're rehabilitated in
some way. And I think that's a really tricky thing
to figure out in individuals, in our own lives, but
(17:37):
also culturally, it's very difficult to sort that out. And
I think as a culture we're starting to reckon with
that idea a little bit more.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
Yeah, I mean, I'm curious because you've went through the
experiences you've gone through, and the addiction and the bottoming out,
I guess is the right way to put it. But
you use your own language experiences. Do you think those
experiences have made you more capable of seeing through the
weaknesses and others or beyond the mistakes that others make?
(18:07):
If I made some terrible gaff on this show, are you,
because of your own journey less likely? Then you might
otherwise have been to say, God, that guy was a disaster, Jesus,
get him away from me.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
I think so, you know, we all have natural capacities,
and I think one of my natural capacities is to
try and see and understand the backstory of anyone and
the belief that what people do make sense to them,
So why does that make sense to them? But absolutely,
if you screw up as often as I screwed up,
(18:39):
and you know, was a homeless criminal, you know, and
just an active, outright criminal to fund my habit. Yeah,
I think there is a certain amount of learning to
forgive yourself, which I think translates into learning to forgive
others or at least understand others. So yeah, I think
I don't know who I'd be if I didn't have
that experience, because it's unfathomable. But yes, I think that
(19:02):
is an element that is really important, is when we
can forgive ourselves. I think there's some synergy and it
goes both directions. You know, learning to be kinder to
ourselves helps us be kinder to others. But I also
think learning to be kinder to others can sometimes translate
back to learning to be kinder to ourselves, a bi
directional relationship, I think.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Yeah. One of the guests on Nita Leff just required
a conversation with her yesterday, Reverend angel Kyoto Williams, you
know who grew up had a dad as a firefighter,
wonderful parent, but also had a caregiver who abused her
as a little girl. And she was describing to me
the experience of the abuser and of her dad and
(19:44):
her dad's inability to protect her, and she described it
all as sort of seeing in them a certain helplessness
seeing that they were caught in a web of experiences
that they themselves couldn't get out of at the time.
It doesn't excuse the abuse. The abuse was destructive and painful,
(20:08):
but she saw a little bit more of their backstory yep,
than just their mistakes. Yeah, and you know, there's this
tension I think, you know, whenever we talk this way,
it's like, wait a second, are you saying that it's
okay to abuse people and not have the met to movement? No,
I'm not saying that. Are you saying it's okay to
be you know, in some ways abusive of people with
(20:31):
intellectual disabilities or race or culture or gender or whatever. No,
it's not okay. But if we want to heal those wounds,
if we want to stop that kind of abuse, how
we go about doing it is not necessarily clear. I
don't think and just saying hey, Eric, you are terrible,
(20:52):
You are a criminal, you are a heroin auty. I mean,
at the end of the day, that doesn't bring anybody
to recovery.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
It doesn't because I think this is a very nuanced
area that we don't really know how to do, because
it's variable on people is this idea of when you
tend to come at someone right with criticism, that person
is almost always going to get defensive right and defend themselves.
(21:19):
You see this with alcoholics and addicts all the time.
If somebody is just riding them to get into recovery,
they're having to justify to the other person why they
do what they do, which is justifying it to themselves
in some way. You leave somebody in an addiction with
a little bit more space. Most of those people know
there's a real problem, right, but they won't admit it
(21:42):
to anybody else if the admittance is, you know, being
attacked and shamed and all that. And yet at the
same time, when you have somebody who's in active addiction
like that, you don't pretend nothing's happening, you know. I
talk to families a lot, and I've gone through this
with people I love who've been in an addiction. What
what's the right way to late to somebody who's an
active addiction?
Speaker 2 (22:02):
You know?
Speaker 1 (22:02):
The tough Love movement I think missed a lot of things.
It got some things right, but I think it missed
some things.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
You know. I was talking to a friend of mine
who works in the addiction space. And she put it
this way, she said, you know, whether we're dealing with
addiction or whether we're just dealing with our brothers and sisters,
or our spouses or whatever, oppositional energy creates oppositional energy.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
That's a great phrase.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
It's pretty simple. If I say to you, Eric, why
the hell are you wearing your hair that way, You're
likely to say, well, you know, because you and it
just become indignant, you know, like it's just oppositional energy
creates oppositional energy. And you know, threatening energy creates defensive energy.
It's it's just almost inevitable. You treat someone with contempt,
(22:49):
you create an almost immediate and almost impulsively irresistible desire
for revenge. Yep. So you know, if you want to
disintermediate the problem that's causing the addiction or the abuse
of women or children or anybody else, it's unlikely to
work if all we do is name and shame and
(23:11):
humiliate the person who's Again, it's hard to say this
because people that have done abusive and horrible things, you know,
the impulses we got to name and shame and humiliate
them because we got to get them to stop. And
I get it. I'm just not sure we have a
very good track record of having that work.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
You nailed it in a phrase. We're not good culturally
at how to rehabilitate people. And part of the problem
is that some people just don't want to be rehabilitated.
Right if the behavior continues to go on, there's no
real choice.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
But yeah, you got to step in. You've got to
create boundaries. You got to put people in jail if
they're violent, you got to put people out of your
life if they're abusive, and all those kinds of things.
But you know, one guy, I was reading this quote
from Pharrell Williams, and I've used it a lot to
try to teach people around dignity issues. Is it goes
on quite a bit at the beginning, but in the
end of the quote he says, even with people I disagree,
(24:24):
I'm wishing them the best. You know, it's okay to
set a boundary to say, hey, look, Eric, you and
I've been friends for twenty years, but what you've been
doing in the last five years I just can't keep.
I've got to create a boundary. We're not going to
talk now. I'm kind of done. But to carry that
boundary with a feeling that I'm hoping for the best
for you on the other side of your life, of
(24:46):
our life, of this friendship that I've ended to me.
That's kind of the spiritual magic. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
I love that. I know someone who has a very
difficult family relationship, and there their mantra has sort of
become innimum contact, maximum sympathy, right, Like it's beautiful, Like
they've just decided that like, to be around that person
is to be abused. So yeah, I need to minimize that,
and yet I can try and keep my heart open
to them as a person, which is really really difficult
(25:15):
to do.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Yeah. I guess my point is, like here we are
on this podcast talking about this that needs to be
a national conversation. Yeah. I think like when we talk
about the good wolf, you know, to the extent we
want to feed the good wolf, that wolf within us
needs some food around this gift, this quality. How do
we set boundaries, stand up for principles, work for justice
(25:38):
by whatever definition we are given to understand justice. How
do we do all that with a lot of empathy
and a lot of love yep, instead of with a
lot of hatred and a lot of revenge. Vindictiveness. That's
a good challenge for us. All.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
Yeah, I saw a clip of you talking and you
said something about when you fight for your principles, add
one additional principle, and that principle is while you fight
for your principles, treat others with dignity. Yeah, and I
love that idea, which is really good. You're part of
something else called the Dignity Index. Can you share a
(26:16):
little bit about.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
What that is? Yeah. The Dignity Index is a little
tool we created. My colleagues Tom Rosshirt and Tammy Pifer
created this tool that allows us to score the language
we use when we characterize people with whom we disagree.
So it's basically, if you and I, Eric, let's say
we don't agree on pick anythought the border. You want
to have open borders and I want to build a wall,
(26:38):
so we disagree. The Dignity Index would let us score
how I treat you, not how I treat the issue,
how I treat you. Do I call you a name,
do I consider you to be evil? Do I characterize
you as inferior to me, as stupid, as uninformed, as selfish?
Or do I go even farther and say your position
(27:01):
is so dangerous that you don't actually deserve to live.
You need to be that's the language of war. Or
do I go up the side of dignity and do
I say, you know, Eric, you've got a position. I
got a position that that would be kind of an
equal time we each need a chance to Or do
I go to the top of the dignity scale, which
is an eight, which is you and I don't agree,
(27:22):
but I will never violate your Eric, your dignity under
no circumstances, no matter how much we disagree, I will
always do my best to make sure you know your
dignity is intact around me so we can score you. Now,
it's objective. It's not like a Trump voter scoring Kamala Harris,
or a Kamala Harris voter scoring a Trump voter, or
(27:43):
somebody trying to catch a Senator this or Minister that
in a mistake. It's it's just an objective score and
it's pretty reliable. It doesn't matter whether you're right or left,
or you know, rich or poor, or black or white
or straight or single or whatever. You can score pretty objectively.
And what's been so exciting about it, Eric, is that
when people learn it. You can learn it in ten minutes.
(28:05):
It's not like complicated. It's a pretty simple scoring tool.
When you learn it, you start to have what we
call the mirror effect. You start to see yourself. So
instead of saying, hey, look, Eric, he's done all this
bad language. He's like a three on this or a
two on that or six on I start to see, hey,
you know what, tim is a two? Like I just
(28:26):
use two language when I was talking about my cousin.
I can do better than that, you know. And you
start to realize that how you treat someone is very
central to whether or not your ideas prevail, because when
you treat someone with contempt, you make an enemy for
your cause. So if I want to argue to you,
we got to build a wall. We got to build
(28:46):
a wall, you idiot, I've immediately made you into an
enemy of the wall, right as opposed to winning you over,
because I think I'm winning you over by calling you
a name. But you know, all you have to do
is let people stand back and watch and they go
of course, that's not going to work.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
There's the relationship expert John Gottman, who's been around a
long time and I'm familiar with his work a little bit.
I don't know it a lot. Yeah, I think he
had like you know, the four horsemen of like the
relationship Apocalypse or something right, and one of them was
certainly contempt.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
It destroys.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
Yeah, it's cancer to our relationship.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
It totally is.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
And it's cancer to a culture, as it turns out,
and sadly, you know, when we look at the data,
we are living in a culture that normalizes treating other
people with contempt when you disagree with them, instead of
a culture that penalizes people for treating people with contempt
when they disagree, we reward them, yes, so we create
(29:45):
this vicious cycle of incentives to be more and more
contemptuous instead of the alternate sycle. This is why I
say the evil wolf or the bad wolf is overfed
and the good wolf is emaciated. When I get likes
and I get popular, and I get more power and
attention by being contemptuous, then you've created all the wrong
(30:09):
incentives for the good wolf.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
It's really true, and it's really hard to resist that
if you're someone who's trying to get attention in the
public eye a little bit, right, Like you know, I
want people to listen to the podcast. So I'm trying
to get attention, and there are ways to do it
that would be much more effective, knowing what we know
(30:31):
about the algorithms. And it's a difficult temptation to resist.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
It is it is, And that's why we need subcultures
that create a counter incentive where and I think this
is you know what you're trying to do. You're creating
a listener community. I'm trying to join you at your
listener community, invite you to join mine. Small cultures maybe
there's five thousand, maybe there's twenty five thousand, maybe there's
one hundred thousand, yep, And they create s upcultures of
(30:55):
people who go, wait a second, that's the world I
want to live. And I want to live in a
world where my ideas are explored, where people I agree
with or listen to, where people I disagree with or
better understood, where we come to solutions that actually work,
that we can implement, that we can solve our problems
for ourselves and our families and our community. Like I
want to live in that world. I don't want to
live in that other world. So I'm going to opt
(31:16):
for Eric's podcast as part of my community. It's not
going to be the same as the one hundred million
likes you'd get if you know, called someone by the
most officious names possible.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
Compared them to an octopus or something.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
Yeah. Now, but you know, these things change over time.
Human beings, we create cultures, we change them. I think
we're at a point where millions and millions of Americans
want to change. They just don't know how to do it.
They don't know where to look. And thank god, some
of them are looking to you.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
Yeah, let's change direction a little bit. I want to
talk about something that you explored a little bit in
your memoir for listeners who don't know your background. Right,
you're part of the Kennedy Shreiver family. You're part of
a very well known, very successful, very ambitious family, and
you talked about when you were younger the pressures you
(32:07):
felt to actually measure up in that family. And you
also talked about how to sort out your accomplishments, you know,
feeling like maybe they're just because you were, you know,
related to the Kennedys. Now that I think your memoir
was twenty fourteen, which means you probably wrote the book
in something like twenty twelve. It's twelve years later, thirteen
(32:29):
years later, Where do you stand with that today? Talk
to me about, you know, sort of how you worked
through that and any evolution that's happened in you sort
of sense the memoir.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Yeah, well, thanks for taking a look at it. That book,
Fully Alive was my attempt to do kind of three
different things. One is tell the story of the athletes
of Special Olympics and the effect they've had on changing
my life. The other was to tell the story of
how my family, largely my mother and her siblings, contributed
to creating a movement around and unlocking the gifts of
(33:02):
people with intellectual disabilities. And the other was to tell
my story. I'd say on all three fronts, I feel
a good deal of I guess what I would say
is I felt like I got a lot of head
nodding when I talked about that book. When I talked
to people about the gifts of people with intellectual disabilities
and how they in effect taught me the gift of
how to be free to be myself, people go, oh, oh, yeah,
(33:26):
I've been to a specially I know what you mean.
I know what you mean. What I did learn is
that's not a gift you learn as an idea. That's
a gift you practice as an experience. Right, So I
go back. You know, our local Special Olympics Unified basketball
program starts in two weeks, second week in January. I
can't wait for the Saturday. It's the same way. If
you know, some people look forward to going to the gym,
(33:48):
you know, practice building up their abs or their shoulders
or whatever they're building up. I look forward to going
to the Special Olympics practices to building up my sense
of my own freedom and my own dignity, and to
learn from those athletes. I'd say it with respect to
the story of my family, you know, President Kennedy, my
uncles Teddy and Bobby, my mom, my grandparents. I feel
(34:11):
proud that at least some people know that a good
part of that family history is not just about political success.
It's about the tenderness and heart that was infused in
that family system by my aunt Rosemary. She's the missing
piece in most of the stories that people tell about
(34:31):
President Kennedy and about my uncle Bobby and my uncle
ted and so on. They tell the story of big
legislation and speeches and dramatic events and tragedies. But I'm
glad that at least somewhere in the record Rosemary's role
is remembered or at least has been shared.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
I loved that part of the book because I actually
do know a little bit about Rosemary, because President Kennedy
was part of a big movement to sort of shut
down the big institutions implement community mental health. And we
could debate a long time whether that was a good
move or a bad move.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
It was a good move, but anyway, go ahead, Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
Well, well, Lesley, Yeah, that's certainly something we could debate.
I think in principle it's a good move. I think
the follow up to it that was supposed to happen
did not happen, which created a crisis. Anyway, my point being,
I've heard about Rosemary a little bit in that context,
but I loved hearing more about her. Maybe you could
just share a couple minutes of her story and a
(35:30):
little bit about your sort of thesis that the tenderness
and the kindness that the Kennedys have came from interacting
with her.
Speaker 2 (35:38):
Yeah, well, you've got it. I mean, my mom was
one of nine children, my grandparents, my grandfather was very
successful in business in the twenties and thirties and forties
and up into the fifties. He's made a huge fortune
by those standards. Those did not, you know, by today's standards.
I suppose it's only a modest fortune. But still he
made a lot of money. And he and my grandmother
(35:59):
are well known for their three sons, Jack who became
the President of the United States, and my uncle Robert
Francis Kennedy became senator from New York and Attorney General,
and my uncle Ted Kennedy became center from Massachusetts. That's
the story. That's the narrative, rich patriarch, big Irish Catholic family,
three gigantically successful boys, and then you have the tragedies
(36:21):
of the murders and so on. What's missing in that
story is the birth of Rosemary Kennedy, who, unlike all
of her eight brothers and sisters, had an intellectual disability.
And in nineteen twenties America, a wealthy family with a
child with intellectual disability sent that child to an institution.
That was the end of it. Doctors would have said,
give up the child, pretend like you did nothing happen,
(36:44):
go home. Take care of your other children. This child
will be taken care of well somewhere else. Just move on,
And they chose to keep her at home. So each
of Rosemary's siblings, including my mom, grew up looking across
the table at a sister who had no school to
go to, who had no friends, who had no childcare program,
(37:05):
who had no doctor, who had no recreation program, who
had no summer camp. And my view is that my
grandmother and my grandfather, in keeping her at home, taught
her siblings that they had to be able to see
what the world didn't see. The world saw Rosemary as
a zero. They knew she was beautiful, they knew she
(37:28):
was funny, they knew she was gifted. So they learned
to see what the world couldn't see. They learned to
see human dignity where the world saw human nothingness. Yeah,
so they didn't talk about it a lot. But my
view is that when President Kennedy gets up at his
inauguration and says, you know, ask what you can do
for your country, it's because he knew that when people
(37:49):
are asked to give of themselves that they get their
best selves in return.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
He knew it, like he'd done it his whole life
with his own sister.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
Every time he was asked to take care of Rosemary,
to include Rosemary, to take her with you, he knew
it was to his benefit that he had this beautiful sister.
So at some level, the lessons that my uncle Bobby
taught that my mom, who you know, started this camp
for children with special needs in her own backyard. I
mean nineteen sixty two. She had like the four phone
(38:19):
calls in the spring. You know, her brother was the president.
She was working on trying to policy change. And the
fourth mother called her and said, you know, missus driver,
there's nowhere for me to take my child. None of
the camps will take my child. And she said, yes,
there is. You bring your child in my house. I
damn it, you bring your child here. There is going
to be a summer camp. It's going to be in
(38:39):
my backyard. Now where does she get that resolve? That
fire that you know? Where did that heartfire burn from?
It burned from knowing her sister deserved those chances and
didn't get them, and she wasn't. She couldn't tolerate having
another mother tell her there was nothing. So I kind
of feel like the hidden spiritual energy in that family.
And you know, I'm not saying to lionize my mom
(39:02):
or her brothers and sisters politically. I'm saying that, you know,
a lot of people come up to me still, you know,
President Kennedy's been gone sixty plus years. They still come up, Oh,
I so admire your uncle. I so you know when
he was president, or your uncle Bobby. He's my roma,
you know. And I think what they're telling me is
there was something in those boys in that generation. There
(39:25):
was some quality in them. And when I think about
what that quality was, it was Rosemary's heart beating through them.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
It's a really beautiful idea, and it makes a lot
of sense in that we are deeply shaped by the
experiences that we have, and we're deeply shaped by what
we're taught about how to handle those experiences. And it
seems pretty clear that that generation of Kennedy's was taught
(39:53):
to treat her with dignity, to treat her with respect.
And they also, like you said, they got to see
her who she was.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
They got to see her the world couldn't see her. So,
you know, if you're a political leader and you're trying
to say, hey, our country. You know, we're talking about
the cycle of contempt right now. I mean I want
to be able to say, hey, gang, which is what
you're saying. Don't you see you've got a good wolf?
Come on? I know you do. You know this because
of your own life. You know, even in the depths
(40:22):
of your own despair, there was something in you that
was still there, that wanted to be healthy and strong
and contributing and compassionate and good to yourself. You know
it was there, right. I don't have to explain it
to you. I have to read a book about it.
You don't need a lesson plan to unpack it. You
know it. So when you speak to an audience, or
when you're speaking to your audience here on this podcast,
(40:44):
you're telling me, I know you've got it in you.
Come on, I know you've got it. Don't trust me,
You've got it. And that's what I think my uncles did.
They said to the country at a time, at different
times when it needed to hear it. Hey, America, you
can do this. We can take on civil rights. We
can work to create extend healthcare. We can build a
(41:04):
more peaceful future. We can volunteer and create connections to
people all over the planet in service a piece.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
I know we can do this.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
So they knew at some level to trust their gut
on these things, and not just to trust the polls,
and not just to trust what people ask of their government.
Most of the political rhetoric we hear nowadays is all
about like, is the government delivering for people what they want?
It's a very good question, and if it's not, it
needs to be fixed that. There's a second question, which
(41:35):
is our people giving to the country what they can.
And that's just as important. But almost nobody asks it
but my uncles and my mom and her siblings, her sisters.
I think they did ask it, and I think they
asked it because Rosemary told them to. Even though Rosemary
never wrote a book, Rosemary never gave a speech, Rosemary
never started a company, Rosemary never excelled in a test,
(41:58):
Rosemary never won an honor ever, nothing her whole life.
On that, all those measures of success she had nothing.
But on the most important measure of success, did she
inspire the hearts of people that she touched? I think
she gets an A plus plus.
Speaker 1 (42:31):
Let's talk about another idea that runs throughout your work,
which is the idea of inclusiveness. Talk to me about
what inclusiveness means to you. Why is it so important
to you?
Speaker 2 (42:42):
Well, I think, you know, the tendency we have as
human beings is to sort, you know, like good, bad, friend, foe,
you know, tall, short, smart, stupid, all those decisions we make.
And you know, sometimes we're classifying things that are good.
You know, if somebody's six eight, maybe they play center
on the basketball team, and if somebody's five eight, maybe
(43:04):
they play point guard. It might not be the other
way around. So that's all okay. But what happens, I
think is that we slip from sorting in order to
make sense of the world to sorting in order to
create hierarchies in the world. I like you, you're good,
you're desirable, You not so much, and we start to exclude.
(43:25):
And we often exclude by when we judge books by
their cover, when we judge people by blunt instruments. If
you have a low IQ, oh, not desirable. Sorry. The
Special Olympics movement is in two hundred countries. You know,
there's five million athletes volunteers that do out fifty sixty
thousand games a year. Every single one of them is
(43:47):
a rebellion against the tyranny and the brutality of exclusion
and judgment and contempt. And every one of those events,
whether it's a little swimming race or a bowling competition
or a skating competition, or attract me, every one of
them is an invitation to say, when in doubt, when
you have the option, when you have a choice, try
(44:08):
to choose to be inclusive. That's it. Do your best. Yeah,
choose to include. That's the message. The healthcare benefits of
joining a community, of opening yourself to others, So being
a part of civic organizations, religious organizations, political organizations, social
cause organizations. The benefits to our health, to our hearts,
(44:28):
to our brains, to our souls are enormous when we include.
But we have so many messages about who to exclude. Yeah,
you know, don't hang out with those people. I can't.
People say this to me. A lot of my friends
are democrats. I spend a lot of time in Republican
circles working on this dignity work. You met with them,
(44:50):
I met with them. I spent thirty years in special Olympics.
What do you think I am? I mean? I got
the basic message. The basic message is have your heart
open to everyone. So this inclusion message isn't you know.
I think sometimes it gets distorted as a political agenda
or fight between this group and that group. And the
Special Olympics world, inclusion is all about relationships. It's all
(45:14):
about being open to another person. It's not about saying
I'm better than them or they're worse than me, or
I need to force you to let me in or
I need to force you to get me out or whatever.
It's just all about saying, you know, and when I
meet Eric, we come from different places, we wear our
hair differently, we have different stories. Be inclusive if you
can try, just try to listen, try to find the good,
(45:35):
try to see what their gift is. If you find
the gift, celebrate the gift. That's the Speciallympics message. You know,
we have a lot of people who can't use language
to express themselves, who can't necessarily run unassisted when they're
running a race. But in the Special Olympics movement, those
are not the right measures. The measure is meet, train,
(45:56):
play and then find something to celebrate. Because if you
have no words and it took you forty five seconds
to run fifty meters and you work really hard to
do that, and you trained hard, and you have your
coach there with you. I'm telling you, the crowd will
cheer louder, and then they cheer to the final four
because they'll know they're in the presence of a gift.
(46:17):
And it may not be the gift you see when
you watch the NBA or when you watch the Olympics,
but man, is it a gift. It's a beautiful gift.
So maybe that's a long answer, Eric, I'm sorry for that,
but you know, choosing to include is good for us
as human beings. It's good for our physical health, it's
good for our emotional health, and it's certainly good for
(46:38):
you know, I would argue our political health at a
time when our country is really hurting. You know, people
are really scared of each other, and they're threatened by
each other, and they're fearful or fearful of one another.
We're fearful of the future because we're fearful of one another.
We need a little dose of wisdom from the special
Olympics community that just says, hey, you know what, you
(46:59):
don't have to gree on everything, but try it ont
be inclusive, do the best you can try a little
harder if you've tried already, and give it another shot,
because there's something good in that person, you just got
to go find it.
Speaker 1 (47:11):
I've heard you talk about this, and you talk about
this idea of you know, every one of us wants
to be part of a circle that includes a. C. S.
Lewis talked about this, right, like everybody thinks there's like
an inner ring of if you just got into that,
you know, and once you're in that, you know it
never really ends. But you say that this idea of
seeking belonging in that way is backwards. We get the
(47:34):
sense of belonging by giving it. And I think you're
talking about seeing with different eyes and seeing that it's
good to be part of a group, even if it
doesn't have the social status that many of us are
seeking and chasing.
Speaker 2 (47:52):
M h, I mean status. You know that some of
the most insecure people in the world are people who
have the highest social status. Why because they're always and
that they're going to lose it. Yeah, And I mean
I've been very privileged and blessed to be able to
be around people with enormous political and financial power. But
I got to tell you a lot of times they're
(48:13):
not very happy, and a lot of times they're quite
unsettled and insecure about themselves. And you think, why is
this guy he's got a billion dollars? Or why is
that person insecure just came here in as private jet,
or why is she insecure? She's not a cover of
magazine and everybody adores her and admires her. And it's like,
those are not the things that deliver. That's the false
(48:35):
programs of happiness. You know, like, if only I get
a lot of approval, I'll be happy, It doesn't work. Right,
If only I get a lot of control over other people,
I'll be happy, also doesn't work. You know, what works
for happiness is deep, enduring, honest, authentic relationships. That's it.
I mean, the social science will tell us that, religion
(48:55):
tells us that philosophy tells us that that's it. I mean, yeah,
we all need our basics, you know, we need food
and shelter and things like that, and we need to
be in a situation where we're not at risk of
losing food and shelter in these things. But after a
fairly basic security around, you know, basic goods, after we've
achieved a fairly modest level of security. The only thing
(49:17):
that contributes beyond that to happiness is relationships. And it's
not like whether you're the head of the Rotary Club
or the Lions Club, or the Democratic Party or the
church council or whatever it is. It's not that you're
the head of it. It's that you're in it. You
know that you're feeling and seen and understood by other people.
(49:39):
So you know, this is a hard lesson for us
to learn. But stature does not convey happiness. It's kind
of a scientific fact.
Speaker 1 (49:47):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We've only got a few minutes left here,
and there's two things I would love to get through here.
The first is a question that we could spend an
hour on. So I recognize i'm setting myself up, but
people talk about how polarized the country is. I love
history podcast. There's one called The Rest is History. It's
(50:08):
a couple of English guys. It's great, and they're doing
this long series on nineteen sixty eight, which I'm sure
you know is the year that your uncle was assassinated.
Martin Luther King was assassinated. And I'm looking at that
and I'm looking at our current times, and I'm thinking
I keep hearing again and again, this is the worst
it's ever been. I just don't know if that's true.
Speaker 2 (50:31):
What do you think? Well, I go with John Lewis,
who said towards the end of his life, I was
at a speech. He must have said it a million times.
He's in. Anybody who thinks things haven't gotten better hasn't
lived my life. Yep. So, the year I was born
in nineteen fifty nine, there were probably two hundred thousand
Americans living in institutions with intellectual disabilities. Today they're basically
(50:53):
are zero. The year I went to school in nineteen
sixty five or six, there were no children with intellectual disabilities,
and any school in America pretty much except segregated schools. Today,
almost every school, public school in America has children with
intellectual developmental disabilities in the school. That's a big win.
So I'm just looking at it from the point of
view of one group population. I think that you could
(51:15):
say the same thing about black Americans. Yeah, there's a
long way to go on all these things. We don't
shrink from the severity of the challenge by acknowledging the
enormity of the change.
Speaker 1 (51:26):
Yeah, that's a beautiful way to say it.
Speaker 2 (51:28):
Yeah, and our country, I look around, it's more inclusive,
it's more diverse, it's more wealthy, it's more loving. I
mean like when I was a kid, I would never
say I love you to another guy. I barely said
I love you to my own mother. And now I
(51:50):
hear that from friends all the time. My kids when
their friends come over the oh I love you. I
mean you could say that's a small thing. I think
it's a big thing. Yeah. So I think there's a
lot of things. I think the country's more diverse. There's
more attention to mental health than there ever was. There's
more support for a whole diverse way of raising families
(52:11):
that women and men are finding their ways into. So, look,
we've got big challenges. We've got a mental health crisis.
We've got an income inequality crisis. We still have persistent
and almost unforgivable discrimination in our country. We have a
long way to go. But I'd say probably there's a
billion people in the world. I'm just going to say
(52:32):
this because it's a crazy number, but I'm guessing there's
a billion people in the world. If tomorrow you told
them they could move the United States, they'd say yeah
they would. Yeah, maybe two they'd come here in a heartbeat.
Why Because still we do represent an enormously privileged way
of living, enormously privileged type of government. And I got
(52:52):
more than my fair share of complaints about our government.
I got a lot of complaints about a lot of things.
But I don't for a minute let it convince me
that we have that may progress and certainly in my
lifetime I'm with John Lewis, We've moved forward in many,
many ways.
Speaker 1 (53:05):
Yep, I totally agree. All right, last thing, you talk
about a miracle, and I love this. You said a
miracle is not a manipulation of the laws of nature
and history. It can also be a way of describing
a dramatic change of mind and heart at the most
fundamental levels of reality. Say anything you would like to
in close in. But I just think that's such a
(53:26):
beautiful idea.
Speaker 2 (53:27):
Well, I hope it speaks for itself. Because miracles, the
premise is unchanged about who causes them. I think miracles
are a function of how receptive we are to seeing
the infusion of reality with the laws of the spirit,
the laws of the spirit which transcend and are matched
by the laws of nature. They don't disrupt, in my
(53:48):
view of the laws of nature, but they operate alongside them.
So when human beings fall in love, it's a miracle.
They don't think in love, they don't plan in love,
they don't decide in love. They fall. We fall, And
we can fall in love this afternoon with a walk
with a child. We can fall in love with a
(54:08):
tree that's changing colors. We can fall in love with
a chance to see someone in an intensive care unit
being cared for by a nurse with tenderness that's unbounded
by professional training or compensation or rules. We can fall
in love with when the heart overtakes us and reminds
(54:28):
us that we're citizens of yet another dimension of reality.
I guess that's the way i'd put it. We're all
destined for something beautiful, and we come from something beautiful,
and a miracle is when we see it. It's there
all the time. I mean, it's just there all the time.
Speaker 1 (54:44):
Well, that is a beautiful place to wrap up, Tim,
I've really enjoyed this. This has been great. I wish
we had two more hours to go.
Speaker 2 (54:51):
But thank you so much, Eric for thinking and working
and playing around with some of the ideas that have
been living in my head for a long time, and
I'm grateful for the you do and hope that our
efforts that need a lift to kind of create another kind.
Speaker 1 (55:05):
Of pod sister or pod brother of yours that.
Speaker 2 (55:08):
Will compliment what you're doing. And hopefully I had the
voices of people on need a lift contributing to feeding.
Speaker 1 (55:15):
The good wealth. Thank you so much, Tim, Thank you.
Speaker 3 (55:33):
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