Comment by David Brooks in a conversation with E. J. Dionne and Krista Tippet for On Being held at Graham Chapel at Washington University sponsored by the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics posted October 20, 2016
In D.C., I have two friends named Kathy and David, and they had a kid who went to a public school, and that kid had a friend who had no real home. His dad had split, mom had drug and health problems. So they said to the kid, “Come over. Stay with us. You can live with us. Eat if you need. Go to school.” And then that kid had a friend in the same circumstance, and that kid had a friend.
If you go to them — their house — and I do every Thursday and hopefully on Mondays — there’s 10, 15, 25 kids there 18 to 22 just getting some food. Last week, a young woman came and said she was 21. This was the first time she’d been around a dinner table since she was 11. And I took my daughter once, and she said, “This is the warmest home I’ve ever been in.” They call Kathy and David Mom and Dad, and there’s just a warmth and embrace.
What we give them — we, as adults, give them the gift of being their audience. So there’s a kid named Ed who would read from his flip phone poetry he’d written. There’s a woman named Kasari who would sing like a New Orleans jazz singer. And you just receive them, and they define themselves in front of you.
And what they gave to us was a complete intolerance for social distance. So when I meet most of you, I shake hands, and there’s a little distance there because we don’t really know each other. But the first time I walked into their house, I reached my hand out to one of the kids, and he said, “We don’t shake hands here. We hug.” And so — big hugs and you’re just physically draped around each other.
We were in a forum, and I quoted this guy, Bill Milliken, who happened to be in the audience last time Krista and I were together, and he’s been working on youth issues for 50 years. And he said, “I’m often asked in 50 years of doing this, what programs work to turn around lives?” And he said, “I’ve done this 50 years. I’ve never seen a program turn around a life. I see relationships turn around lives, and I see love turn around lives.”