What A Good Person Actually Looks Like

Last night was the final class of my criminal law course. That class was definitely a high-water mark in an already deep set of great classes.

Professor Dana Cole teaches Evidence, Criminal Law, Trial Advocacy and is the Director of the Summer Trial Academy at Akron Law. He has won professor of the year multiple times by multiple groups. He is a member of the Teaching Team of Harvard Law School’s Winter Trial Advocacy Workshop. His resume goes on and on like that. But you get the idea.

He’s not a great teacher because he knows criminal law so well, which he does. He’s a great teacher because he cares so deeply about his students. His love for his students is genuine and real. Other teachers certainly care about their students. But this is on a level that I’ve never experienced before.

At the end of our last class last night he told a story about a friend of his who he helped with various legal issues. It was a wonderful story. He helped this man with getting a job at his mom’s restaurant, getting his sentence reduced and stuff like that. But again, it wasn’t about the logistical stuff he did for this guy. It was the stuff in the cracks of all that. Going out of his way, taking risks for him, giving him second chances. Stuff like that.

It was more like a sermon than a lecture. The title was: “So why do you help these criminals?” (or something similar). The idea was that by helping one person, other people got helped in other ways along the way. When you help one person, you end up helping his family, his employers, his friends… on and on.

At the end of the story, Professor Cole said, “Now this next part is hard for me to tell. I usually get choked up.” He emotionally went on to say that when this man got out of prison, he was given some polyester clothes, $75, and a ride to the Greyhound Bus Station. With his $75, he bought a $25 ticket back home and two plastic coffee travel mugs. They were blue and were basically marketing material for Folgers “Good to the last drop”. One of these mugs was for his mom, and one was for his close friend, my professor, Dana Cole.

Professor Cole said that to this day, that plastic Folgers mug sits in a special cabinet where he keeps all the meaningful items he’s collected in his travels and through life. It was such a touching, warm, loving story. Clearly, that mug meant a great deal to my professor.

I recently got a mug. Here’s a picture of it as of this morning:

My friend CJ bought it for me on Easter morning when I took him to CVS to pick up some items he needed for his house.

CJ has a wide array of mental and physical disabilities. So he gets a check for about $950 a month. $300 of that goes to me for renting a room in my house. And the rest of it is for living.

A mug like this at CVS is not cheap. I would imagine it’s easily $10. Probably more. CJ could have spent that money on anything. And he chose to spend it on me.

I promptly took that mug, thanked him for it (I was truly touched by the gesture at the time), put it on the back floor of my car that was filled with Taco Bell wrappers and various other trash.

And there it sat, for weeks, until last night after Professor Cole’s lovely story.

What a steaming pile of shit I am!

This beautiful mug that CJ bought with his own money as a way to thank me for helping him over the years just got abandoned among trash and dirt on the floor of my car. It’s such a sweet, wonderful mug. Professor Cole’s mug (no offense), was a plastic travel mug. Professor Cole took his mug and immediately put it in a cabinet where he kept important items. I threw my mug, a ceramic mug with a cute bunny perched on the side that CJ thought I’d enjoy having my tea in, on the floor of my dirty car. Broken, forgotten, lost.

I felt so terrible. I immediately went home after class last night and rummaged around in the dark looking for it. I couldn’t remember which car I drove. Both cars are filled with a ton of garbage, so I had to look and look. After about half an hour (and some further looking this morning), I recovered it. The bunny had broken off the side of the mug, and his little hand had broken off his arm.

I’ve often been accused of being a “good person,” of having a “good heart.” That is never a label I would give myself and this situation makes that point.

Every once in a while, I’ll see something where survivors from the Holocaust come together and thank the person who helped them survive through that time. Those stories always annoy me. And I never want something like that for anything I might have done to help a person here or there. Sure, you helped 50 people. But at least 11 million innocent people were murdered in the Holocaust. How can doing so little in comparison to the real catastrophe always warrant such accolades and celebrations? I don’t know if these kinds of celebrations are meant to point out what complete selfish cunts the rest of us are, or that we are meant to feel good about ourselves because someone saved a drop of water from an ocean of misery.

I am never happy with my “accomplishments” in this space. I never wanted to be the guy at the bottom of the river, picking up the leftover parts that have been washed out. I want to be the guy at the TOP of the river who stopped the system from throwing people in the river of lost souls in the first place. I want structured camps and safe parking lots. I want to work with the people who have been so ravaged by a cruel and unusual system that they are completely insane and repeatedly have parts of them cut off due to frostbite and untreated wounds that fester into gangrene.

I don’t want to house 3 older guys who are so desperate to live indoors that they have grown too tired to fight. These guys are the easy ones to help. They are senior citizens now. I’m glad I can do it. It’s better than nothing, I guess. And I REALLY like them. But it’s so small. It’s so meaningless.

I want to do the hard things. I want to change things.

So, yeah. I just threw that mug on the backseat floor of my car. Not because I wasn’t thankful that CJ gave it to me. But because it just represents a trail of failed attempts to systematically help this community of people.

If anything, what I do helps this disgusting system more than it helps these guys. The city of Akron can sweep camps, tear down houses, and take homeless people’s belongings over and over again, and people like me (and people who care FAR MORE than me) come behind and quietly pick up the pieces.

I don’t feel grateful. I feel enraged. Thinking of the little things I do doesn’t make me happy. It makes me turn a deeper shade of black. I hate that a person feels the need to give me something for renting a room to them because no one else would do it.

What complete and total bullshit.

I’m not grateful. I’m hateful.

But, I appropriately feel bad I treated CJ’s gift with such carelessness. I’m helping him and two other guys. And I bring my camper over to Grace Park on Fridays where we eat hot dogs, drink coffee, listen to music and hang out. Those people often say they wish other providers would spend time with them more. They appreciate the food. But the company means more to them.

It’s not nothing.

That’s about as good as I can feel about the work I do. It’s not nothing. And if it’s not nothing then it must be something. And something is something. It’s better than nothing.

That’s as good as I can do for congratulating myself on what I do for a group of people freezing on the streets of the richest country in the world.

Someone recently told me that we never seem to need a bake sale to pay for the next million-dollar bomb we drop on some random group of brown people. But we always need a bake sale to feed and shelter American children, veterans, and senior citizens.

And what I’ve recently learned is that this isn’t what America has become. This is what America has always been. A country where a bunch of rich white guys control all the money and resources while they enslave the rest of us. Slavery looks a little different today than when George Washington did it. But it’s still slavery.

America is such a shit hole that I guess I deserve a nice gift for renting a room to a guy that coudn’t afford the deposit or pass the background check to get a room anywhere else. I guess that’s the truth of it all.

When you live in a toxic waste dump, the guy who pushes a little bit of the piss, shit, and rotten garbage away to make a small patch of plain dirt so a few people can sit in it deserves a parade, I guess. The bar is so low. But some rich guy will get mad that I moved his garbage for those people. So, it won’t last long. Garbage has more rights in America than a human being with no money.

It’s so hard for me to find gratitude in the small, inconsequential work I do. But I am going to try telling myself that “it’s not nothing.”

And I’m going to get some glue and fix that mug.

Thank you, CJ. I really do love you, man.