Rod Dreher

Sexual Revolution: Symptom, Not Cause

‘The Power Of Small Things’

By Rod Dreher • January 8, 2013, 7:49 AM

The Mall Killers thread keeps on producing gems from you readers. The latest is this remark from a reader who posts only under the lower-case initial “k”:

I wish people could know how small it really can start, the power of small things. Enough to make a new generation just a little bit better off than the last in how they parent, in the level of life chaos they are willing to tolerate, in what they expect and believe of themselves. Because I have come from this underclass of poverty and crime (multiracial, not the specifically black inner city) I can think of the examples of success, where convicts have turned around, where children of parents in jail have come out okay, where very bad teens find success as adults, where torn up families find religion or something that heals their hearts, all of this. And it is nothing so special; there are many. I always wonder why we don’t hear more about this, the things that actually are working on the ground, though still too few to arrest the greater trajectory. There seems something ugly in many of our spirits that loves the crime tragedy stories on a tv special, but if it’s a story where people found God and/or actually raised up their level of morality and behavior, we make a face and turn away.

You know what I’d like to read? Stories from you about small things that made an enormous difference in your life. Stories of hope. Go.

Posted in Crime and Punishment, Culture. Tagged crime, culture, hope, mall killers, race.

13 Responses to ‘The Power Of Small Things’

Ann says:

January 8, 2013 at 8:24 am

We have to remember that a small percentage of children are blessed with amazing resiliency. Children who come out of bad situations and still manage to persevere and do well in life are most likely blessed with this resiliency. Personally, I think it’s a function of the brain, just how some of us are born prone to anxiety or depression or whatever. However, most of us aren’t so blessed, and need more structure, and then of course there are those who are even more fragile and need even more support. In other words, I’m not sure there is any “one small thing” for anyone, but just luck being born with that resilient personality. Perhaps these folks can look back and say it was that one teacher who made a difference, etc, and that could be true, but I still think the real cause is in the brain.
MikeS says:

January 8, 2013 at 8:39 am

A middle-aged woman in our church was widowed, unemployed, and a few steps away from being homeless. She had no front teeth, which made her appearance jarring (not so good for job interviews or customer-facing jobs). People in the church located a place where she could get free or low-cost dental implants to restore her teeth, which improved her appearance and confidence. She now has a job as a store clerk; still struggling, but a step in the right direction and I think the church played some part in this.
Brian says:

January 8, 2013 at 9:26 am

Just yesterday my wife sent me a text message with a picture of my daughter holding a new stuffed animal at the mall along with the story behind it.

“At the mall and this sweet old man gave Lilly pennies for the fountain. Then he ran into us looking at stuffed animals and insisted on buying her one. I tried not to let him but he said he didn’t have any grandchildren of his own and he really wanted to. I hugged him as he told us happy new year. It was really touching.”

When I talked to my wife she retold the story how he walked up and put his arm around her and said, “which one is her favorite?”

My wife said, “it made everything better instantly.”

What he didn’t know, is that last Thursday my wife went to the Doctor and found out that at 12 weeks pregnant she had miscarried. Surgery followed the next day and it’s been a rough couple days, as you might imagine. She may be overstating that it made everything better instantly, but that kind man has no idea just how much he positively affected my wife (and brought joy to my daughter who slept last night with the stuffed animal tucked in next to her).

I wish I could thank him.
Caroline Nina in DC says:

January 8, 2013 at 9:28 am

My parents weren’t divorced, but my father died when I was young, and my mother became a terminally depressed recluse. I was raised with little discipline an, d few limits, and because my family were educated and readers, I was a mouth verbal nihilist by the 8th grade.

I am eternally grateful to the group of neighbors who had me over for dinner, invited me to church, and listened patiently to my Dead Kennedys albums. I met Jesus Christ–then took Him with me when I went to a totally secular, progressive, druggie boarding school where I had gotten a scholarship. Maybe that’s just what I needed for my faith to really set: people making fun of it all the time. But even there, I had some great mentors whom I truly believe were God’s messengers, though they knew it not.

Here I am 27 years later, still trying to live the Faith and I find that my time in the Blue State secular context as well as my own family and personal suffering has helped me to really love people and try to see where they are “at” as well as to see the image of God within them. It can be a great basis for evangelism.

I tend to sympathize a lot with the worries about decadence and cultural decline on this blog, but I also see so much good, and so many of the most unexpected people, from the most unexpected quarters, are closer to the Kingdom than they even know.
k says:

January 8, 2013 at 10:05 am

Some small things received by my family and/or witnessed in others:

In cases of a father in jail, tell the children their daddy loves them – if they’re your children, relatives, or even if they’re not anything to you, say it anyway. It’s worlds different if daddy has to be gone for a child to believe that he loves them, even if his problems got in the way of his love for them, than to believe dad’s a worthless ahole who doesn’t care or love them.

Encourage men in prison to write letters, draw pictures, to send to their children. Even if for reasons of poverty, distance, broken relationships they never get visits with their children. Tell them how much this means to children. Tell them a thousand times.

Preach and give the example of self control. Every religion from Judaism to Islam and beyond teaches of the greatest strength being in controlling your own spirit and conduct, your own self when provoked. This should be the highest strength for any man or woman to aim for. Say that you can’t hear when someone starts to holler in your face; “train” each other into keeping calm and speaking with composure. If someone raises a hand to you, parents, couples, family or not, Walk Away. Continue advocating THIS as the greatest strength – not beating each other up and down.

Be the idiot who says makes mention of God every time someone talks to you. Be a broken record. Be known for it – turn everything back to God. Mindfulness of miracles, no matter how small. Gratitude to the Creator. Calls to pray to God for help and to keep praying until He does help. Reminders that we will each be called to account for the things we have done. Repeat ten thousand times. These are not just words, they create a climate of faith, they have actual Divine power to create, within the hearer’s heart and mind.

Different areas I’m sure are different, but the religions I have seen most effectively helping and transforming actual families in trouble are Jehovah’s Witnesses, Islam, and Bahai’s. There are so many practices and particularities that perhaps others could emulate.

If you’re a teacher, a volunteer, some kind of professional who does not otherwise have your personal life in close contact with this class of people, give your heart to some child or teen or adult. One or two a year, each year or for as long as you know them. Don’t try as much to be something to everyone, but to several someones you may be nearly everything. To reach out and devote yourself to a child or a family is not over when you are no longer in contact – it lives on, for them, the little places in their heart that you healed, the memories you created of someone who had compassion or was trustworthy.

For the ones so disordered that it seems all they do is chew you up and spit you out, give your love anyway. If they have to see and hear “I care about you” from 200 people before they believe it or even begin to understand what it means, you are still doing something important for them if you are number 75 on the list.

The great self respect and true power of change that can come from an adequately presented religious faith. People in these families are living out stresses and hurts and sufferings of great level. They are STRONG, if in a chaotic or disordered way. They don’t need a wimpy, easy forgiveness, ask nothing of you kind of spirituality that also delivers little or nothing. A religion that understands man as warrior, for these men who know and live their strengths but in all backwards ways. A religion that raises up a woman, and elevates how women treat each other, in true self respect. Something worth living for, that offers identity, schedule, discipline along with its mercy and love. A faith in God that lives and functions all the way through every adversity of this life and on to the Hereafter, because for many there never is going to be an easy good day in this life and they know it.

I can think of so many more!
Matt in TX says:

January 8, 2013 at 10:21 am

In my case, children’s books. I don’t come from a desperately poor or dismal background, and I don’t know that my childhood had any more than the average share of unhappiness. But children’s books helped tremendously –the really great ones, I mean: Roald Dahl, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Tolkien, the Chronicles of Narnia, The Phantom Tollbooth, The Egypt Game, books by Avi and Beverly Cleary, etc.

I remember the first time I read a chapter book (it was Charlotte’s Web, and I think I was 5 or 6) I couldn’t believe my good fortune that there were such things in the world, that I and all other human beings were so lucky as to be able to pick them up and read them whenever we wanted to.
Ken T says:

January 8, 2013 at 10:43 am

I think there is a very good point here. For about as long as there has been a thing called “journalism”, there has been a saying in that profession that “if it bleeds, it leads”. In other words the tragic, the sensational, the disaster, the crime story … these are and have always been the stories that get the front page. Why? Precisely because these are the “man bites dog” stories. They stand out because they are not the normal everyday experience of most people. If the world in general really were as dangerous and gruesome as the headlines make it seem, then no one would want to read about it – they’d be living that every day.

On the other hand, in the real world, it is the good news stories like those described above that get overlooked, because to most of us, they are not “news” — they are just the way things are supposed to happen; and more often than not, they do.

And that, I guess, is a very good thing.
Josh McGee says:

January 8, 2013 at 10:58 am

No one believes me when I tell them now, but when I was young I had the foulest mouth imaginable. I don’t know why; it wasn’t allowed in the home. (I know, I know, if only that were our worst problem, and I’m sure I have worse traits than this still needing correction.) But this is going somewhere.

When I met my wife, there was this definite tension where I felt I should refrain from that sort of language around her. Apparently, unbeknownst to me, my parents had snuck in a bit of chivalry into the back of my mind, the sneaky scoundrels. This tension alone, this severe pressure in my mind that there are certain things that shouldn’t be done was the slow start, the lighting of a fuse, that encouraged me to take seriously the gospel. There were two parts to this: a lesson taught by parents I was not aware had been taught and the presence of a young woman who, without ever having to say a word, impressed upon me the notion of how she would like to be treated.

Oh, wow, I hope we don’t screw up and forget to pass this lesson on to the young children we’ve now been given to raise. :-O

Yes, a very small thing, indeed. Some people may say, “Yeah, but you weren’t on a path to prison, which is the sort of chaos we’re talking about here.” No, I wasn’t. But little things like this episode and those lessons I didn’t realize were being taught may now help my marriage stay intact and give my children better odds of a stable life. Most of this stuff doesn’t happen overnight. It piles up, little by little, over 2-4 generations (or more). People are constantly making little deposits into their family and culture or they are taking out little withdrawals. They are building up and adding to what has been handed to them or they are consuming it. Hopefully our family is not consuming it; the Judge will have the final say.

Time for one more personal anecdote? I recently took my 5-yr old son on a short trip, one hour each way. We picked up a Henry Golden Boy .22LR rifle, a gorgeous piece that I hope will one day be handed down to him. What can I say? My southern tendencies get the best of me sometimes. On the way home we were both very quiet, and I assumed I had wasted a good opportunity for saying something wise. Later that day, he had a birthday party to attend with all his little friends. Cake, ice cream, the bounce house, the whole bit. Loads of fun. That night, without me around, my wife asked him what his favority part of the day was. He said, “Going with dad.” We just have no idea how much influence we have on our children these first few years. He preferred the quiet, boring car ride with Dad to the sugar and bounce-house. The little things count.
k says:

January 8, 2013 at 12:45 pm

Many little things add up. In my own family there wouldn’t have been an improvement that would have impressed observers at any one time, but my grandparents generation (both mothers and fathers) did things like abandon their small children, drink themselves to death in their 40′s, and commit suicide in spectacular ways designed to maximize the trauma upon all family members. My parents and their generation kept themselves alive but were the lowest of the low, nearly every personal and social failure discussed today – no morals, prison, welfare, some barely literate. My generation in the family managed somehow to keep intact marriages, maintain working class jobs (a few made it to college), and have a minimal stability through life. The following generation of the family have all completed college/postgrad (or expect to when old enough) and have become a professional class now, marrying and having their children later, traveling, making money and contributing more to the rest of the world. We do have smart genes, and tend to find religion, but so do and so can many of this underclass today.
catherine says:

January 8, 2013 at 3:47 pm

My 9th grade English teacher was a single, brassy feminist. In our tiny Iowa public school, she was considered a radical left-winger. She was also passionately and loudly pro-life.

At age 14 I was straining a little at my Catholic upbringing. In a writing assignment I blithely made an assertion about abortion that would have saddened my parents. I was proud that I was “thinking for myself.”

Ms. Duggan wrote one comment in the margin of that paper: “I guess you can believe that if you want.” One short sentence she dashed off while grading a pile of lousy 9th grade essays. She probably didn’t think about it for more than a second. But her skepticism brought me up short. It made me re-examine my burst of self-congratulation.

I’m not saying I would have grown up to work for NARAL if not for Ms. Duggan. But that skeptical comment was a “small thing” I kind of obsessed over for a long time. I wasn’t smart enough at age 14 to understand why. Now I know that an adult had just demonstrated that being contrary for the sake of contrariness isn’t a substitution for real reasoned principle.

A lecture wouldn’t have had the same effect. Or a book. Or an emotional reaction from my parents. It had to be that one “small thing.”
RB says:

January 8, 2013 at 8:24 pm

I have found what k says about being willing to be #75 in showing love to the unloveable very true.

I was a dysfunctional, self-destructive teenager, and it would have been natural for people to mutter under their breath, “Well, that was a waste a time,” after attempting to help me.

Little did they know how many seeds they were planting. The family that took me in for a couple months while I was struggling to finish my senior year could have thought it was useless, because I lost in the years I’d invested in a rigorous AP class schedule and dropped out a couple months before graduation, and then moved out of state, still locked into the same unhappy life I’d built for myself.

But the seed they planted took root, and started to grow. A couple of years later I was in college, getting married, and doing well–and I think about that family with gratitude every day. They were willing to be sowers without the guarantee of being harvesters.

Part of their example that is so powerful to me is never once did they say “you need to graduate” or tell me how to fix anything. Like the quote goes, they preached the gospel without words. They didn’t take my failure to visibly progress quickly personally. Their love gave me the space and safety to feel like I was ready to change.

I think that is the stunning, delightfully sneaky thing about Jesus’ example. Sacrifice and faith, whether one is religious or not, is part of really profound service. It is very hard to commit one’s time or energy to a person or situation that looks like a black hole. We want to see results. We want to know our efforts are worth something. We want to be right. Wanting to serve others in the advisory capacity first, where we are the enlightened ones giving a hand up/lecture to the willfully stupid, is very natural and has some immediate self-satisfaction. Sometimes it’s almost impossible to resist that urge and unfortunately that approach of treating a struggler as a broken object is too often accepted or even codified into some churches and organizations. But nothing works like actual love.

I have received the fraternal correction “love”, and the true love. People who carry that Christlike charity and mercy are irresistible, and incredibly influential on the people around them.

One of the most impressive, influential people I have met was a housewife who listened to promptings and acted on them. Once when I was with her it was as simple as her feeling the need to change lanes and slow down nearing a bend in the freeway outside Denver. After the curve, we saw a minivan off the side of the freeway, broken down, with a mom and kids inside. Her willingness to serve meant everything to that family that day. And this was her regular life–just going about and doing good.

There are some people I’ve met who seem to be born with this capacity for charity; it’s not limited to any one religion. But religion is handy for giving regular naturally snarky people like me the hows and whys of this kind of service.
RB says:

January 8, 2013 at 8:28 pm

Oops. I should clarify, my friend was ready to immediately pull off to the side of the road, which she did, and she helped care for the children and lent the lady her cellphone (this was back before cells were nearly universal).
Ping Lin says:

January 8, 2013 at 10:57 pm

It is disappointing, but not altogether surprising, that this topic has attracted such a paucity of comments.

Rod, I don’t suppose you’d consider making this a regular part of your blog? (Perhaps once a week or some such, you could give people space to share their small blessings and comforts.) It could well end up being, in itself, a “small thing” that helps shape the world.