USA TODAY International Edition
Carter, Sanders show age is just a number
The pair are role models for serving into maturity
I could not help but be moved by recent photos circulating out of Nashville, Tennessee, showing Jimmy Carter, looking as though he had been punched in the eye, patiently fashioning a piece of wood and preparing to use a power drill — lending his energies to a building project for one more person in need.
Yes, that Jimmy Carter, former president, the man for whom I cast my first ballot. The man, 95, who just became the nation’s oldest former president. The man in whom, apparently, there is no quit.
In the photos, Carter wears a red bandanna, a baseball cap, a large bandage over his left eye, and a large bruise beneath it and across his cheek, along with 14 stitches courtesy of a fall he had taken a couple of days earlier at his home in Plains, Georgia.
Carter, whose humanitarian streak knows no end, is an inspiration. He has been building homes with the nonprofit Habitat for Humanity for decades, while taking on scores of humanitarian projects both at home and abroad.
He seems, as one old friend used to describe such folks, driven to do good.
“I fell down and hit my forehead on a sharp edge and had to go to the hospital,” Carter told a crowd on Oct. 6 at Nashville’s fabled Ryman Auditorium. “And they took 14 stitches in my forehead and my eye is black, as you’ve noticed. But I had a No. 1 priority, and that was to come to Nashville and build houses.”
Indeed, Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, 92, now the longest married presidential couple in history, were part of a team building new porches on 21 Nashville homes. The project was part of the 36th Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Work Project with Habitat for Humanity.
Enduring service to humanity
Carter, as president, was not our greatest. His critics cast him as weak and ineffective.
Maybe he was. People still blame him for the so- called Iranian hostage crisis without delving too deeply into our problematic relations with Iran that continue today.
He is also looked on with disdain for disallowing American athletes to participate in the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. Carter called for the boycott to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In other words, he did something you rarely see today. He took a stand on principle, not politics.
He also kept us out of war, and he fought hard for a smarter and more sustainable energy policy.
And yet for all that, he is considered a failure in some circles. He lost to Ronald Reagan, the Gipper, who was Hollywood handsome and had a way with words and who was also going to “make
America great again.”
Even so, we are right to celebrate Carter’s endurance even as it comes around in these same days that some are questioning the health of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who suffered a heart attack on Oct. 1, and encouraging him to drop out of the presidential race.
Sanders, 78, directly addressed the event that put him in a Las Vegas hospital, where he underwent a 45- minute procedure to have two stents inserted to address a blockage in an artery.
“I was at an event and … for the first time in my life I said, get me a chair, I have to sit down. And I was sweating profusely,” Sanders said. “I said to my staff, ‘ Guys, we’ve got to get out of here.’ ”
Lessons for the journey
In an interview with CNN’s Sanjay Gupta in at his home in Burlington, Vermont, on Oct. 10, Sanders indicated he would be continuing with the campaign, adding that “at the appropriate time, we’ll make all the medical records public for you or anyone else who wants to see them.”
I don’t know whether Sanders should drop out of the race. It strikes me as the most personal of decisions. He alone knows how he feels. What I would say about Sanders, though, is that he seems genuine, a politician to be sure, but one who, like Carter, is driven to do good.
In the end, I think that as you get older you gain appreciation for your elders, those who came before, who have been where you are now walking, and somehow survived into greater maturity. Both Carter and Sanders are teaching us lessons about the journey, and maybe we can take some of them along as we make our own way.
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