HARRY CHAPIN INSPIRED GOODWILL TOWARD MEN

At least once a month, it seems, I attend a charity event meant to inspire all of us to activism but that instead leaves me feeling like an unworthy slug of a human being.

These are the best of causes where the intentions are good and the crowd empathetic. The speakers are inevitably earnest and dedicated to the cause. Just as inevitably, they walk slowly to the lectern and proceed to let us have it.

People are suffering, they lecture, and we, yes we, have abandoned them.

Now, I haven’t personally abandoned them. Most of the time, I don’t even know them. I do care about them, which is why I’m there in the first place. But so often the message is less about how we can help and more about how we have already failed as human beings, because we haven’t committed enough acts of self-sacrifice to lay claim to membership in the same species.

This voice-of-God finger-wagging from the lectern doesn’t bring out the best in me. By the end of the speech, I just want to bury my head under the covers of my queen-size bed and stay there until the first robin sprints across the front yard.

I miss Harry Chapin.

Now there was a guy who knew how to make you care that you haven’t cared enough. By the time he was done, you even felt worthy of his faith in you.

I’m going to force myself to believe that someone, somewhere, doesn’t already know who Chapin is and tell you that he was a folksinger, storyteller, filmmaker, and tireless activist for social justice until he died too young in a car crash on July 16, 1981. He was thirty-eight.

I went to several of his concerts during high school and college. He even kissed me once on the cheek after signing my brand-new World Hunger Year T-shirt, which he sold to raise money for the organization he founded.

What I still most cherish about Chapin is his lesson about how to change people’s hearts. He shared it once during a chat with the audience between songs.

When he first started writing folk songs, Chapin said, he was the guiltmaster: People are starving! People are suffering! The world is falling apart! And you—yes, you—are doing nothing to help!

Nobody cared.

Then he started writing and performing songs in which he was the screwup, the jerk, the one who couldn’t get it right.

In “Cat’s in the Cradle,” he was the father who never had time for his son who now never had time for him. In “Taxi,” he was the cabdriver who’d run out of dreams when a girlfriend from his past handed him the fare and said, “Harry, keep the change.” He was the morning disc jockey who abandoned his family for W-O-L-Dee-dee-dee-dee.

Millions cared.

He’d figured out, he said, that if you don’t mind being the fool, you can help people face their mirror image. His songs gave us the space to identify our own missteps, our own regrets, without ever having to admit to them.

Then we wanted to change.

“He started writing good songs when he made himself the villain,” said his brother, Tom, who still performs and also serves on the World Hunger Year board. “His best stuff is where he’s the ‘everyman’ and the audience gets to learn along with him.”

At least half of Chapin’s concerts were free, either for a charity or a benefit. Whenever he talked about the world’s hungry, he told stories about the people and just assumed we’d want to help. My radar for grown-up disapproval was finely tuned, and I never felt he was lecturing.

Tony Kornheiser wrote Chapin’s obituary for The Washington Post. He told a story about joining Chapin for a late-night snack after one of his fund-raising concerts in the nation’s capital. Kornheiser knew how dedicated Chapin was to wiping out world hunger, so he razzed the singer when he ordered “a big, thick sandwich.”

Chapin didn’t miss a beat.

“Look,” he said, “I’m not asking you to starve; I’m simply asking you to try and spread the word that we grow enough food each year to feed the world easily. You’ve got access to a great newspaper here. For God’s sake, use it.”

I miss Harry Chapin.