Free We Can All Do Better by Bill Bradley

which apparently had been hit by another car, was in flames. “Well, I guess I made a difference that day,” he said.
    I asked him how he got started driving the roads and helping people. He said that one snowy winter night when he was sixteenand living in Illinois, he was driving alone along a rural road and his car slid off into a snow bank. The motor died and the car was stuck. It got colder and colder. He began to worry. At that moment, a car pulled up. “What’s the problem?” the driver asked, and offered to take him to the nearest town, which was fifteen miles away. When the Good Samaritan dropped him off, the boy said he’d like to do something in return, but the stranger wouldn’t hear of it. When the boy persisted, he said, “Well, there is one thing you can do for me.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œPass on the favor.”
    â€œSo,” the patroller of the San Diego freeways told me, “that’s what I’ve tried to do for the past twenty-two years.”
    Personal experience is life’s best teacher. Sometimes it can produce lessons that reverberate out into the larger world. I interviewed Randy Lewis, a Walgreens drugstore executive who ran one of the company’s six regional supply centers. Inspired by his autistic son, he asked the Walgreens board for permission to staff 30 percent of his workforce with disabled people. They agreed, and after he had hired people with autism, cerebral palsy, and Down syndrome, he found that productivity improved. For one thing, he said, autistic people do a better job of, say, moving boxes from place to place, because they tend to focus more intensely on repetitive action. What he hadn’t expected was the effect that his decision had on the rest of his employees, who were proud of what hiring the disabled said about their company’s values.
    The 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act removed barriers to disabled people’s participation in the daily activities of life, mandating such things as curb ramps, toilet grab bars, and wheelchair lifts on buses. What the act also did was to irrevocably change a national direction. Sometimes after passage of a direction-shiftinglaw it is necessary to aggressively enforce it. (Think civil rights here; the Justice Department filed suits against restaurants that continued to discriminate, or school districts that refused to desegregate.) But after a while, people’s values impel them to go further than what the law requires—to its spirit, the dream it embodies. The Walgreens executive didn’t need a law: He had his own personal relationship with disability; the law simply created a framework that allowed his request to be taken seriously. In this way, government can encourage people to act from the deeper impulses of love.
    Sometimes when we overcome adversity, the experience allows us to find ourselves and guides us to what we really want to do with our life. Molly Barker, a North Carolinian and longtime runner, came from a family with a history of drinking problems. In her twenties and early thirties she seemed headed in the same direction. Then one day at age thirty-two, she went out for a run. She reached a point in the course when her head cleared, and she felt the endorphins flow and the calm descend. After the run, she vowed that she wanted to feel every day, all day, as she had felt on that run. She managed to give up drinking and started a group called Girls on the Run, which aims to show middle-school girls from eight to eleven years old, through running, the spontaneous power they have within, before society can squelch it. In one of Molly’s groups was a girl named Brittany. She was mute. She spoke volumes with her eyes and her smile, but never uttered a word. Molly made some inquiries and discovered that Brittany could speak but never did. She had been severely and frequently beaten as a young child. On the last day of the twelve-week course