Free We Can All Do Better by Bill Bradley Page A

and after each of them had finished a 5K, Molly asked all the girls to describe their experience in Girls on the Run. “Awesome,” said one. “Beautiful,” said another. “Fun,” said another. When it was Brittany’s turn, she couldn’t say anything. Molly was disappointed.
    The next day the group held its appreciation banquet, at which the girls were given various awards. Brittany was called to the stage to get the Grand Communicator Award. As she took the trophy she pulled out a handwritten card and gave it to Molly, who read it to herself and then asked Brittany if she would like to read the card to her teammates. Brittany stepped to the microphone, held the card tightly with both hands, squinched up her eyes and then opened them and looked out at her teammates for what seemed like an eternity. Then she said, “The word I wanted to say on my last day out with Girls on the Run is love.” The girls and their families rose in unison and gave her a standing ovation.
    When the spirit leads us to take selfless action on behalf of another person, we are expressing our deepest humanity, and that impulse emerges, often, in unforeseen places for unpredictable reasons. I interviewed Linda Bremner, a woman living outside Chicago, whose eleven-year-old son, Andy, had contracted terminal cancer. While Andy was being treated in the hospital, he got a lot of letters from family and friends, but when he came home, the letters stopped. He asked his mother one day, “Mom, have people stopped sending me letters because they know I’m going to die?”
    â€œNo, of course not,” his mother said. “You’ll get more letters, I’m sure.” The next day, she started writing him letters signed “A secret pal.” If he had a bad week and had to stay home, she’d send him three letters; on a good week, when he attended school, she’d send him one. One night she came into the kitchen and saw him writing something. She tried to look at the piece of paper, but he pulled it away and asked her for an envelope. When she gave it to him, he stuffed his letter into it and asked her to deliver it to his “secret pal.” She started to open it, and he said, “No, not you, Mom. Give it to my secret pal.” After he’d gone to bed, though, she opened the letter. There was only one sentence. It read, “I love you, Mom.”
    Several months later, Andy died, and some days after the funeral, while she was doing the painful job of going through his belongings, she found a shoebox on the floor of his bedroom closet. Although he had not been a particularly neat child, she discovered that inside the shoebox were all the letters from his “secret pal,” organized chronologically. In the bottom of the box was the address book he’d brought back from the Kids with Cancer camp he’d attended the previous summer. Out of her desire to pay tribute to Andy, she started writing letters to each child in the book, trying to buck them up as she had tried to buck up her own son. An amazing thing happened: She started receiving letters from all over the country asking her to write to another child somewhere who the letter-writer knew had cancer. She honored as many of these requests as she could and finally started a nonprofit organization called Love Letters. In ten years, she wrote over four thousand letters to children with cancer all across the country.
    A concerned Sirius executive asked me one day, “What are you going to do when you run out of these kinds of stories?” It’s never happened, and it won’t, because there are millions of people out there just like the ones I’ve interviewed. When Americans are moved by something—poverty, homelessness, spousal abuse, failing schools, teenage pregnancy, absence of values, a deteriorating environment—many of them are impelled to do something directly to change the situation for the