What Do You Need?
A small question with a huge impact.
What follows is an excerpt from my newsletter report on the Utah GOP Organizing Convention of yesterday, May 1. It has applications to our struggle to expand the party, but it also says something about a very simple and powerful question we should be asking for a multitude of reasons.
Please read on:
If I may take a Point of Personal Privilege (something heard often at the Utah GOP Organizing Convention yesterday), I want to share a bit of personal growth coming from a conversation I had at the Convention, one that lead to bit of epiphany. I will not identify the person with whom I had the conversation because I do not have her permission and I want to respect her confidentiality, but if and when she reads this, she will know who she is.
As several of us were chatting before the proceedings began, the conversation turned to helping people and a story was related about how there was a mental health patient who seldom, if ever, got out of bed or left his room. My partner in the conversation related how she had asked him to lunch to get him reengaged in life and he continually deferred until she asked him this simple question – “What do you need? What is it you need to get up and go to lunch with me?”
As it turned out, the gentleman did not own a pair of shoes.
That was it. He was embarrassed to tell people that he did not have shoes - probably even a little frustrated that no one had noticed - and as a result, he had isolated himself to his room and his bed.
The heroine of our story remembered a pair of her husband's neglected but still serviceable boots in their storage shed. He husband agreed to give them away and she took the pair of her husband’s old military boots to the shoeless man.
Upon her arrival at the facility, the staff was amazed, asking her what she had said to the patient - because for the first time since he arrived, he had awakened on his own, showered and shaved without assistance, gotten dressed without help and was sitting on his bed, fully dressed and ready to go.
The miracle of that simple question changed a man’s life. My conversation partner went on to tell that soon afterward, he left the facility, moved to another state, got a job to support himself and returned to a life in the world.
While it might would seem remarkable that no one ever noticed the fact that the single missing variable in this life’s equation was a pair of shoes, that oversight is emblematic of how we tend to look for complicated answers to simple questions. The more complicated we assume the answers to be, the less we feel compelled to find the answers.
But isn’t “What do you need?” the question we should be asking of people who are not Republicans? Shouldn’t we be asking them what is it they need to get up and come join us?
The answer is likely to be a whole lot less complicated than we think.
We here in Utah, as a Party and an ideology, are in a struggle for survival. Utah is the fastest growing state in the USA, and as we continue to receive refugees from blue states who bring with them the beliefs which caused the environments from which they are fleeing, conservatives and Republicans are headed toward the Endangered Species list if we do not get to work. From new neighbors, teens approaching adulthood, minority groups trapped in the statist machine thinking of inferiority, we need to ask, “What do you need?”
We need to communicate to them that when they are told government can give them what they need, that is a false promise because that “gift” always comes with strings.
Political demographics predict our future and as the old, “Each one, teach one” adage goes, it is each of our jobs to talk to our new neighbors and friends about what being a Republican truly means, that we are not the “selfish” Party or the Party of racism, bigotry, and any other “isms”.
What do you need?
Simple and powerful, it is an interesting question, don’t you think?