There’s a lot that has changed about my community. That happens when you live someplace for 43 years. But, despite an entirely different complexion and economic status and just about everything else, there is some strange and persistent spirit that is East Nashville.​

This week, East Nashville friends, families, neighbors, and small businesses have suffered extraordinary loss - including two lives - due to a middle-of-the-night EF3 tornado. It’s been devastating.

I have seen the East Nashville community rally before and I know they can work like dogs when it comes to helping a neighbor and uplifting our community. I saw this in 2010 when the city flooded and I saw the results from the 1998 tornado when I was stuck at college and couldn’t get home to do my part. I saw it growing up when families were advocating and organizing for anything from cleaner alleys to safer streets to better schools to battling slum lords. We would gather in the basement of Tulip Street Methodist Church around a potluck of someone’s potato salad, someone’s deviled eggs, someone’s lime jello salad, and someone’s fried chicken - and be a community.

I have been reminded this week how, in a crisis, in real community, people will activate and just do what they can: you have a chainsaw, you cut fallen trees. You still have electricity, you offer a shower or laundry or a place just to be. You have a few bucks and a wagon, you pass out water and snacks. You have a pair of gloves, you pick up whatever debris is out there - whether the remnants of a roof or shredded insulation or a pile of bricks formerly protecting someone’s home or business. You have a full heart and just don’t know what else to do, you give a hug and just let people know you care.

You do all of it, big and small, and all of it matters.

This is a truth I’ve known about East Nashville - all of my life.

Tonight, Margot McCormack of Margot’s Cafe hosted a “cookout” outside of her restaurant supported by some needed libations from Woodland Wine Merchant and some sweets from 5 Daughters to bring the community together and share some food, a little alcohol, and some camaraderie and love. Many of us still do not have power. Many others cannot stay in their own homes and cannot run their businesses. Some have lost everything. People are hurting.

I went to the cookout because I have felt helpless and disconnected and my spirit has been deeply troubled by the loss my community has faced. I just needed to see some familiar faces. I just needed to give a hug to a neighbor. I figured I’d grab a hot dog or something and just hang out with my wife and kids. It was oddly very important to me to be there.

This time, thanks to Margot, I traded the lime jello for a lamb chop - and some greens with black-eyed peas, and a kale salad, and maybe some Israeli couscous salad (guessing, but delicious!), and much more. It was just so East Nashville. All of it. Today. Always.

I do love lamb chops. I do love East Nashville.

Some things change. Some things stay the same.

​Recently, we have seen a handful of elected officials “step up” and speak their moral truth about the current resident of the White House and the political state of our country. Many of us have celebrated, or at least sighed in relief, as someone (other than John McCain) in the president’s party broke silence and spoke from a place of clarity, honesty, and individuality. We have been relieved and have applauded leaders who we may have never imagined applauding. I listened to Jeff Flake’s powerful speech in its entirety. I actually think I even voted for Bob Corker the second time, but have long since stopped applauding him, and instead have felt betrayed by the disappearance of his candor and individuality – even if I didn’t always agree with his position. The guy I voted for showed back up.
 
We should all pause, however, as more people step up and lead (by retiring) and thus feel “liberated” to speak their truth.
 
What are we actually seeing? Eventual honesty? Contextual morality? Conditional leadership? When these men are finally “liberated” from the office we elected them to, from the privilege of leading our country, THEN they are honest?! THEN they will speak truth to power? THEN their morals matter?
 
Don’t get me wrong, I am glad some people are finally speaking up, but let’s be honest about what it tells us about them, and the offices to which they were elected. Their sense of liberation and their delayed and diluted honesty illustrate a clear lack of integrity as it relates to their elected office. Integrity is “what you do when no one is looking” as the saying goes. Integrity is “the choice between what is convenient and what is right” according to former NFL coach Tony Dungy.
 
When people speak out only when it is convenient (after they’ve announced retirement, for example), they aren’t leading. They are convenient opportunists, moral relativists, demonstrative of the demise of social, cultural, and moral leadership, (and thus representative democracy) that leaves us with corruption, elitism, nepotism, and the perpetual belief that the ends justify the means (making money, getting elected, etc. is the top priority and will compensate for those other pesky problems like integrity).
 
We need to step back and observe this behavior, like most anything, through the critical lens of how we would talk about it with our children. Would we tell our children: once you are no longer in Ms. Smith’s math class, or after you win the big game, then you should acknowledge that you or another was cheating? Would we tell them to get elected to class president or to any other leadership position no matter what it takes, even if it compromises their values? That they can just attempt recoup their principles once the position is successfully attained – or when they are done with it? Don’t litter if someone is looking? Help someone who needs it only if someone is looking? Do it for the reward? Do it only if it benefits you?
 
If this sort of self-centered relativism isn’t what we want to teach our children, we should at least recognize that this is what we are modeling for them and currently applauding as leadership.
 
If instead we want to teach them integrity, we had better start by modeling it ourselves, and then demand it of our leaders. We should not accept, much less celebrate, eventual, conditional, convenient honesty that suggests integrity was dead all along.
 
 

​As a father of two young children and an advocate for and with young people for much of my career, I want to make an impassioned request: stop associating bad behavior by adults with the actions of a child or adolescent.

The petulant child analogy, the “adult daycare” image, or any of the other references to adolescence that try to capture the limited emotional intelligence of the current resident of the White House fundamentally misunderstand and muddle both what it means to be a child and what it means to be an adult. The petulant adult is a different beast from the developing child and we need to treat him as such.

For starters, my child’s daycare while full of petulant children, including my own, is a place of love and growth and inspiration. It’s a place of unbounded learning and development, not unbounded dysfunction, conniving, and malice.

In a typically developing child, mistakes, conflicts, and even random tantrums come from naiveté, exploration of boundaries, and the reality of yet-to-be-developed parts of their brains that drive things like executive decision making and management of emotions. I struggle with these things every day as a parent, but I recognize that my kids’ lack of logic and decision-making is normal, natural, and why they need consistent, loving parents and other caring adults around them. At the end of the day, they are doing their job developing and I just have to keep doing mine in guiding, loving, and supporting them unconditionally.

We should never confuse this process and generally healthy dynamic with what we see happening in our White House, in our country, our boardrooms, or anywhere else. We should never associate genuinely childlike behavior like tantrums or grabbing someone else’s toy with the actions of adults who persistently lash out irrationally, don’t understand basic relational norms and constructs foundational to a society, and who use their position and power to manipulate and disempower others. In adults, this is not naiveté; it’s perversion. It’s not exploration; it’s intention. It’s not about their limited brain development; it’s about the rest of us accepting and normalizing bad behavior because of someone’s money or position or race. None of this is child-like. It is sick.

At the root of the illness is privilege, which not only has the ability to arrest basic social development in the child of privilege but also can persist to embolden and empower that lack of development as a source of ignorant, coercive, bully power in adulthood. The other privileged of us not directly impacted by their malevolence only feed and strengthen it through direct support or inaction.

I don’t know what to do at this point except try to do the little things every day to keep finding a place to move my next foot forward.

So, today, let’s take some power back, take a step forward, and reclaim our language not only in fairness to our children but also to clarify the real issues we are facing.

Donald Trump is not a petulant child in an adult daycare. He’s a sick adult. It’s different.

Days like this, weeks like this, waking up and living in a world that does this: there is a part of me not very deep down that just wants to crawl in a hole. Hide away with my family. Protect them. Love them. Protect our love from a hateful world. I am still fighting through this instinct.
 
And, at the same time, I have been reading and writing and thinking about power and love and society. This love that I instinctively want to hide away and protect, this love I want my children to feel, this safe, isolated love – it will not help. It is powerless. Anemic. It is part of our problem. It is a defense, a denial. It separates us, and is a sign of weakness and selfishness.
 
My alternate instinct is to release the rage and frustration I feel about our culture’s unwillingness to think of, consider, act, and legislate with a mind toward the other, rather than just our own needs and the needs of people like us. Maybe it’s my age, maybe it’s having children, but I feel we as a country are more self-centered than ever before. We are citizens of an economy driven by the belief that our self-interest is what matters. We are competing with each other for scarce resources. If we get ours, somehow it will trickle down, out, or up to be the best for the collective. We will have done our part. That’s what capitalism has taught us, right? But, surely we are more than cogs in an economic system – more than economic citizens.
 
What about all of this flag hullabaloo? There’s a broad war of social values and ideals being waged but in the narrowest possible way because we no longer know ourselves as part of a society. We talk about Democracy and try to build it with an economy, not by practicing democracy and building it with a society.
 
I see it in curt interactions among neighbors on the sidewalk all the way up to the person in the White House. We want what we want. And, if you don’t want it, then fuck you. You’re wrong. I’ll get mine, and don’t try to stop me.
 
Our social bonds and identities have become so weak that we see codified rights and laws as the guidelines for society rather than the safety net that will allow all of us in a society to thrive and provide the opportunity for us to be our best selves. The law defines the basest form of ourselves that a society can tolerate and remain in tact. We believe we have a right, therefore we must. It’s not prevented by law, therefore, we should. If our neighborhoods and communities feel weak, this is why. It’s because they are. The social bonds have given way to economic and legal ones.
 
I am starting to rage.
 
So, now I am back at love, but not the love I want to hide away and protect. I need to find a love that has power. Efficacy. Purpose. A love that is generative and potent.
 
How do we empower love rather than protect it? How do we cultivate empathy that builds a society? How do we teach and learn that the needs and feelings and perspectives of others matter even as I have a right to my own? How do we teach our children that sacrificing of one’s own self is not weakness, it is strength? That the other is part of us? How do we teach and learn that love is power and the ultimate power is love?
 
We are missing something, people. We are missing basic human connection. We are missing decency and personal sacrifice. We have sold our souls to ourselves. We are consumers of our own propaganda, and we’ve lost contact with each other and with something more powerful.
 
I have not written myself into any answer or sense of clarity here. I am lost.
 
So, I will just come back to the words I wrote in reaction to a previous gun tragedy in Dallas, hoping I could empower, rather than protect, love so that others might also:
 
 
Dear People,
 
I love you.
 
I love you because today I feel lost and powerless and I need to love you. I love you because I need love this morning and it’s the only light I can see.
 
I love you because whoever you are and wherever you are and whatever you look like, you have within you the power to help heal this world, to help heal me or the other person next door crying through his morning coffee, holding his kids a little longer and tighter, attempting to drive to work through bleary eyes.
 
I love you because people I don’t know and cannot tell are hurting and need someone to love them.
 
I love you for the implicit value of love to our common humanity, to the common life force among us. Only love allows us to share this humanity and not hold it within, isolated, alone. Love connects us, opens us to each other.
 
I love you for your implicit value.
 
I love you because only love can create the world I want to live in, to raise my daughters in.
 
All I hear in my head this morning repeating over and over again are Dr. King’s words: “Darkness cannot drown out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drown out hate; only love can do that.”
 
In the spirit and hope of sharing some tiny light this morning to drown out darkness, spreading love to drown out hate: I love you.
 
Anderson

​If ever there was a case to be made for being in the moment and being more present, even on a Monday, this week’s solar eclipse was it.
 
For weeks, it was all over the news. Everyone was talking about it. People were flocking to Nashville. Hotels and bars were packed. It all seemed like another super-hyped special event for a city that loves its own super-hyped special events. More noise in a noisy world. I was kind of over it before it ever happened. It was still Monday.
 
But then, just before noon central time the eclipse began. To see a small bite being taken out of the sun was surreal. It sparked wonder of what our ancestors must have thought. It challenged me to locate myself in a galaxy, not just a city or country or even planet. All I wanted to do was watch and absorb. Shrink.
 
But, as the moon covered more and more of the sun over the next hour and a half or so, we battled overcast skies, worried we were going to miss this magnificent moment we had been sold for so many weeks. As the time got nearer, the clouds got heavier. Oh, our misfortune! Oh well.
 
Totality was moments away. We would miss it. Carry on. It’s Monday.
 
And, then the clouds broke. There it was. The glowing ring around the complete blackness of the moon. A void with fiery red flashes along the right side. It was nighttime around us. An orange sunset spanned all horizons. The crickets began chirping. The birds went to sleep. There were bats flying around.
 
All of nature was out of sorts – or, were we all actually in perfect sorts? Present with it.
 
My reaction and excitement completely surprised me. I was giddy. Oh my! Holy cow! That is unbelievable! Look at that! Goose bumps. Watery eyes. I encouraged my daughters (3 and 5) to try and take it in. This breathtaking moment; mathematically predictable and yet profoundly spiritual. I felt powerfully tiny and humbly expansive.
 
And then, a piercing white light emerged. Seductive. The “diamond ring.” It was so small and specific. For that brief moment, it felt like a spot light, a beam being sent directly to me. Individual. As it grew, we were all flooded by white light like none of us had ever known. The intense contrast of stage lighting. The hyper-reality of it made us all aware of each other, engulfing us in wonder, looking, observing.
 
Inexplicable waves of shadows washed under our feet.
 
Euphoria.
 
And, then it was over.
 
It was one minute and fifty-five seconds of totality (official time).
 
One minute and fifty-five seconds on a Monday of observing light.
 
One minute and fifty-five seconds on a Monday of watching nature.
 
One minute and fifty-five seconds on a Monday of trying to locate myself in the cosmos.
 
One minute and fifty-five seconds on a Monday of deeply shared experience with others.
 
One minute and fifty-five seconds on a Monday of complete presence.