This story came across my socials feed, attributed to John Perricone.
Several years ago I invited a Buddhist monk to speak to my Senior elective class, and quite interestingly, as he entered the room, he didn’t say a word (that caught everyone’s attention). He just walked to the board and wrote this: “EVERYONE WANTS TO SAVE THE WORLD, BUT NO ONE WANTS TO HELP MOM DO THE DISHES.” We all laughed. But then he went on to say this to my students:
“Statistically, it’s highly unlikely that any of you will ever have the opportunity to run into a burning orphanage and rescue an infant. But, in the smallest gesture of kindness — a warm smile, holding the door for the person behind you, shoveling the driveway of the elderly person next door — you have committed an act of immeasurable profundity, because to each of us, our life is our universe.”
This is my hope for you for the New Year — that by your smallest acts of kindness, you will save an other’s world.”
I couldn’t get the story out of my head. I eventually lost the social. So, I searched for “Everyone wants to save the world …”. The quote was by satirist P.J. O’Rourke, and not as an inspirational statement.
In this clip from his 60 Minutes interview, he complains about liberal policies built, not out of a true desire to make a difference, but out of a desire to feel like you make a difference, even if the difference you make doesn’t stand up to common sense:
P.J. set up the statement so that it was the punch line of a cynical rebuke of what he sees as bleeding-heart stupidity. The same sentence, in one case it was set up to inspire me, to invite me to an empowering perspective, which it did, and in P.J.’s case it was set up to piss off the reader. If both sides got pissed off, all the better, because anger sells, and, to P.J., that’s all that mattered.
