Most of us go through life unconscious of the choices we make steering down the roads we take. We do not think, "I have this particular gift or talent and I will use this to try to do that in life." We are, we realize, not remarkably brilliant, not the best quarterback in the nation or the smartest student. We do the best we can, apply for positions which seem in reach and hope to make the best of what we've been dealt.
The sheriff pictured above, laughing at his trial for having lynched a Negro freedom rider knew, at some point, the best he could do in life was not college or a career in medicine or engineering. He just hoped to be a good ol' boy, with friends who liked him and would help him defend the life they had known, keeping the colored in their place and the privileges for white boys in place. He would never lead a civil rights march to make life better for an underclass or make society more just.
Mitch McConnell knows he's got the best job he could ever have hoped for as a U.S. Senator. And if his career does nothing more than help his backward state hold on to its small mindedness, well that's the best he could have dreamed for his life's work.
The man on top, Alexandre Yersin, was Swiss, German speaking but with enough French to be able to go to Paris, where he found his way to a lab run by a short man who was already famous, named Louis Pasteur. Yersin, too, did not have great expectations. Like the other two men, he did not think himself particularly gifted, brilliant or destined. He just worked on one problem at a time in the laboratories at the Pasteur Institute. He helped develop a vaccine against tuberculosis, and slowly, he did well enough that Pasteur offered him a position as a research associate.
But Yersin said, at a crossroads in his life, I do not think this is enough, to simply do what is expected of me and to be satisfied with the conventional rewards.
So he got on a boat, as ship's doctor, and sailed for Indochina, where he explored the rivers, heard the roar of tigers at night and thrilled to the great adventure life could hold for a man of ordinary intelligence but more than ordinary character. He set up a clinic in Indochina and was happy to explore, to dabble in cultivation of rubber plants and to learn about a new people, the people who would one day be called Vietnamese.
When the telegram came, in 1898, from Pasteur informing Yersin of an outbreak of plague in Hong Kong, Yersin did not have to be told to hop a ship to that British colony. He knew this was a chance to apply modern science, the science Pasteur had taught him to solving the mystery of the Black Death, which had once killed 25% of all Europeans. Yersin did not speak English, was ignored by the arrogant British military colonial governors of Hong Kong, who had invited a Japanese scientist to Hong Kong to solve the mystery. The Japanese man was given a hospital and full cooperation of the British authorities, while Yersin worked in a humble grass hut and methodically discovered, identified and raised an antiserum to the plague bacillus. The Japanese man got it wrong, identified the wrong bug as the culprit and sailed home. Yersin went back to Indochina, where he saved lives with the anitserum he had developed--this was the days before antibiotics--when plague hit Indochina. He reported his findings in the medical literature, naming the bacteria, Pasturella pestis, after his mentor, but Pasteur would have none of it and renamed it Yersinia pestis.
Yersin died forty years later, as the Japanese rolled through Indochina, having led a life neither he, nor his family, nor his childhood friends, nor even his colleagues at the Pasteur institute could ever have imagined.
It was a life which happened because he was not satisfied to accept a life of limited possibilities even though he may have looked at himself and said, "I'm just an ordinary man."
Mitch McConnell and the laughing sheriff could never have a life like that, not because they have ordinary talents and intelligence, but because they have ordinary character. They can never push beyond what their friends, family and colleagues imagine for them. They squander the possibility of making a difference in life. They desperately cling on to the small lives with a small mindedness, but worse, with mean hearts incapable of risking for the sake of making a difference in the lives of others in the direction of helping people who cannot help themselves.
I suppose this is nothing more than a modern day Christmas Carol, writ large--about men whose own lives were diminished by a meanness of spirit, when they could have been much more, could have used their lives to help rather than harm others.
Not that Mitch McConnell or the laughing sheriff would ever see it that way.
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