As we all begin a new year of life in Sonoma County, we should look across the local landscape and also within ourselves and count our many blessings. By the luck of genetics and geography, we live in a peaceful, plentiful and free country. We happen to also live in one of America’s most beautiful and bountiful regions. For those of us with family, a job and a home, we could not possibly be more blessed. And we don’t need to look too far to see someone who could benefit from our over-abundance of good fortune.
A very great man who lived a long and meaningful life here once said, “The most important lesson I have learned is that there is a commonality of the human experience. Before we are born, we do not receive a written guarantee from some higher power stating that we will never be disabled from an illness or accident, never get old and never die,” he wrote. “None of these choices are available to any human being. Therefore, we each share in this ‘commonality of the human experience’ and as fellow participants in the ‘lottery of life.’ ”
Many of our readers will recognize these words as belonging to Tom Farrell, who died in 2014 at the age of 88. Farrell was a humanitarian, a Rotarian and a community pillar of justice, generosity and love.
Farrell ran away from his Montana home and an abusive father at the age of 10, taking a younger brother with him. One of his own four children was born with cerebral palsy, and Farrell dedicated his entire life to the abused, disabled and less fortunate. Regional Rotary clubs still operate a summer camp for abused youth that he founded called Cool Kids Camp.
If still alive today, Tom might remind us to look around the world, perhaps to Syria, where there are 2 million refugee children living with bombs overhead and a severe scarcity of food.
There are 68.5 million people around the world who have been forced from home due to wars and civil strife, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency. Among them are nearly 25.4 million political refugees, over half of whom are under the age of 18.
Tom always reminded his Rotary lunch table partners about the luck of our genes and geography. Although Irish, he was an adopted paisano by local Italian-Americans. He was one of a few non-black members of Rev. James Coffey’s Community Baptist Church, and he was also a regular at business leadership tables in the Latino community of Roseland.
Tom might want us to go beyond the clashing headlines about a Mexican border wall and immigrant caravans. With a bad spin of the ‘lottery of life,’ he might remind us, it could be our fate to have to flee our Honduran or Guatemalan homes, chased by the murderers who killed our fathers or brothers. It could have been our 7-year-old daughter or 8-year-old son who died of dehydration or influenza last week at the New Mexico border station.
More than 20,000 migrants are now massed at the Mexican border. These are families, thousands of children and political refugees seeking safety and a better fortune than the one into which they were born. The lottery of life does not spin to play favorites or winners and losers; it just spins. (“There but for the grace of God go I …”)
We owe one another and ourselves the gratefulness of being here in Sonoma County in the year 2019. We are wildfire survivors, children of immigrants, some of us homeless and some of us a bit lost.
But Tom Farrell would tell us we are also his friends and part of the commonality of the human experience.
We are grateful to have Tom’s lessons to lead us into another year.
