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Teri Orr: Hope flows

Teri Orr, Park Record columnist

I hesitate to talk about hope because I don’t want it sound like a place and therefore an endorsement of a candidate whose husband came from that place… there is time enough for that discussion of needing to look for someone else to represent my political positions. I want to focus on the hope that bounced all around this week.

There is no particular order to all this because it felt like each time I refreshed there was another amazing story that checked out to be true. Take the whimsical, first — the father and son who invented a kind, painless way to harvest honey from bees with a sort of honey-on-tap system that is simply brilliant! Their Kickstarter campaign (technically, Indiegogo) was set to raise $70,000 to launch this business to manufacture the equipment needed. Or you could simply make a donation to support their humane efforts to produce honey. In a matter of days (and they still have a few days to go) they exceeded their expectations — as Steven Covey liked to say. As of this writing, more than $12 million has been donated to fund their project!

Then there was the Swedish millionaire who purchased 400,000 acres of Amazon rainforest land for $14 million dollars. After a bit of research it appears he did this in 2005 so not certain why it hit the wires this week but maybe the deal finally closed. And we learned again — doing well can propel you to do good. Also, the price of land in the Amazon is pretty darn cheap. I mean, $14 million only buys you an average home on less than acre in Deer Valley these days.

Then there was the young CEO of Gravity in Seattle who read an article that said there is a significant difference in a person’s emotional wellbeing when they make $75,000. So he gave all his employees raises so they would be making $70,000, by taking a pay cut of his own. It was, he said, "a moral imperative." And you wondered how other CEOs would view that. He says he has heard from many and he expects more will follow suit.

Imagine that…

Moral motives seemed to be the impetus for singer/songwriter John Legend to announce he was going to help fight against the insane level of mass incarceration we have in this country. The program is starting in Texas because it leads the nation in people held in prisons and in the imbalance of the population base in those prisons. For example, Texas is 13 percent black but the percentage of black prisoners is over a third. And many are being held for nonviolent, low-level, drug-related crimes. And many enter the system under 18 and stay there. There is a rattle on the bars starting all over this country. One of the most powerful TED talks ever was from black civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson on this very topic in 2012. We imprison more people than are in all our colleges combined. We need to flip that. John Legend is adding and raising his voice to this national disgrace.

And that guy in Rome… news this morning, this time on NPR, said Pope Francis had put an end to the war against the American nuns that had stared under that other guy in 2012. The women here were becoming increasing outspoken on issues of immigration and planned aid cuts and other subjects Rome felt did not make them "authentically Catholic." Bad call, boys. The Women Religious took their works and their words on the road. And Nuns on a Bus was born. A different group of women would roll into different towns to discuss helping the poor and underserved. What would Jesus do? Oh right, that is what he did. So a five-year cloud was placed over the heads of American nuns and made them fearful to even book a speaker on various rights for fear of reprisal. And folks from Rome came over and interrogated the women on what they thought and said. And somehow, two years ahead of schedule, Pope Francis decided enough was too much and ended the review process and declared his appreciation and love for the American outspoken, broad-minded broads.

A few years back I was introduced to a magazine called Good. You can subscribe online, and I do, but I also subscribe to a print version that comes out quarterly "for the global citizen," which is really all of us on the planet now. Each story is from a different part of the world and it reveals intimate details of passionate people doing good work. Or it tells a story of someone that explains or maybe whispers at what shaped them. From Buenos Aires this time, there is a thoughtful, well-researched piece about Jorge Bergoglio and the kind of priest and bishop he was there, before he was tapped to become pope. There are rich photos of the maze of dangerous streets that Jorge often walked, so as not to forget all who he served. And it discusses during the time of the dictatorship there were heroes and villains and most people were both. A woman researcher interviewed said "Everyone walked through the maze as best they could, and some did better than others." There is evidence Jorge erred in his judgement of other priests at the time and it may have cost one his life. In the end, the author concludes: "What if Pope Francis is a great man not in spite of his ethical lapse, but because of it?"

And that, that gave me hope. And quite a lot to ponder about the shifting state of the planet and how good it feels, right now, to celebrate Sunday in the Park…

Teri Orr is a former editor of The Park Record. She is the director of the organization that provides programming for the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Center for the Performing Arts.

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