smile pretty

Hold doors for other people. Pay the toll for the person behind you. Pick a charity or two and donate both your time and money to it. Clean up after yourself. Tip generously for good service. And even if the service wasn't the best, still treat them with decency. You have no idea what is affecting them at that moment.

I don't know if it was my mom who taught me these things, or if I read them somewhere or if I just figured them out for myself. And, in my maxim in of questioning everything, I sometimes wonder why I do them all.

The cynical side of me thinks, "Hey, that guy's got two working arms, why can't he open the door for himself?" Or, "Why pay the toll? He should have had money if he was going to take this road." Or worse yet, "Am I helping to foster a society of welfare and entitlement by giving to charity?"

And yet I do it all because something inside tells me it's right to.

But is it all a façade? Is it a façade like every new house they build?

When I was at my first teaching job, it was at the end of a road, at the end of a subdivision built in the 80's. And then a farmer died and during my first year at the school, the road was extended and branched and houses flew up overnight. The walls, the paint, the windows, they were all ready to go in giant pieces. Some men who were handy with nail guns threw them up. and in two years you couldn't see any more empty land.

What struck me most about the houses, though, was the care with which the faces of the houses were constructed. Each one made to look slightly different. Different colored stones, bricks and mortars. Various styles or real wood plank siding, lovely divided light windows and the nicest trim you could find.

But on the sides and on the back, the windows were plain. The exterior was clad in cheap vertical masonite no thicker than a Hershey chocolate bar. The trim was plain and sometimes nonexistent.

I thought, "why would anyone buy a house that looked good on front but looked like every other house (cheaply built) on the other 3 sides?"

To my shock, the houses ALL sold. Most before they were even finished.

Last November when we were house hunting, I was all but adamant that we find a house that looked just as good on the sides and back as it did on the front. To me it was a sign of care and love put into a house.

All the houses we looked at, however, were just like the ones I'd watched get thrown up around the school. The builders didn't care about craftsmanship, they cared about money. And why spend money on something most folks will never see?

We ended up getting one of those houses with the Masonite sides. Beautiful front with nice stone work and wooden siding.

It's a lovely neighborhood. Sidewalks run by perfectly kept lawns, dutifully treated with the proper chemicals to keep out the unwanted natural growth and beds of flowers and bushes perfectly manicured and treated to the point of falsity.

People don't care for their yards, they treat them. They don't love their houses as homes, they love them as investments.

As I was walking last night after watching the story of Edward R. Murrow, I realized that this neighborhood and the millions of others exactly like it spread across the American suburban landscape were not the problem but only a symptom of the greater issues of gluttony and sloth that face our nation.

People don't care about what's under the surface. As long as there's gas in the SUV, the cell phone connection is good and there's escapist entertainment on the boob-tube, no one will ever wonder what's underneath it all.

I was particularly struck by the beginning of the movie I watched right after "Good Night and Good Luck." Though the rest of movie isn't worth mentioning, the idea of "King Kong" that stuck with me is that while people are being evicted from their homes, living in tin shacks in the park and going hungry, all they really wanted was escape. They didn't, or couldn't fix the problem, they just wanted entertainment.

I wonder what we will be like when we're evicted from the homes we don't really own? What will we look for when the cell phones go silent and the TV goes black? What feasts will we have when the bank accounts run dry and we can't put gas into our SUVs to get to the Super Walmart which I'm sure will still have fully stocked shelves?

The reason I still open doors, and pay the extra toll is because I have an idea of what's under the surface of all this. And all too easily it could go away. I'm not trying to provide entertainment or escapism, I'm providing care, compassion and love. Ideals the leaders of this nation are sorely in need of.