Be like Letha

Have you ever met someone that exuded light? I have known and know people like that. One of those people was Letha Fullwood. She almost made it to the age of 85 before she recently passed away.

This woman loved people, I mean LOVED people. Everywhere she went, she knew someone. She grew up and lived most of her life in the tiny, rural community of Champion, Texas, but I bet she knew more people, I mean really knew them, than Taylor Swift.

During her funeral, her oldest grandson talked about a game they would play with her where they would take out a map and point to a place and ask her if she knew someone from that place. More often than not, she would, and if she didn’t, she knew someone who knew someone else that was from that place.

I was blessed to have been known by her. She knew me by name and knew things about me and my family because she actually cared to take the time to know. When I would see her, she would take time to speak with me for however long I wished to speak with her. She did the same for everyone she knew. She made you feel like you were special to her because you really were.

She had this brightness about her that came out of her eyes and her voice. Even when she was down, she was happy, if that makes sense. One of my favorite parts of growing up in Champion was being waved at by Letha. She would wave with both hands, even while driving down the road.

The sad thing about this is she is the exception and not the norm in how she loved and showed love to people.

I recently saw a Facebook post on one of Sweetwater’s community Facebook pages where a woman wanted to give up her dog. People asked her why, which is a fair question. She said that it was because her husband recently passed away, and it was hard for her to deal with the dog along with all that was going on in her life since her husband’s passing. The dog was his. I can understand this having lost a husband myself.

Instead of

having compassion on this woman, most people who responded in the group were more concerned about the dog and showing anger towards her because she wanted to give up the dog. Several people told her she should find a way to keep the dog and were offering so much heartfelt concern for this dog. One guy said she should honor her husband by keeping his dog, which was really none of his business because he didn’t know her. She didn’t respond very well to these suggestions, and I don’t blame her. Here she was hurting and asking for help, but they cared more about helping the dog than her and offered her very little compassion.

If Letha had been involved in this conversation, she would have at least offered a kind voice to this woman instead of insisting she just suck it up and keep the dog. I wish I had taken the time to do that myself instead of just reading all of the comments. I need to be more like Letha and take time to show kindness and offer encouragement to others.

I am blessed to have people like that in my family, some with a similar big personality like Letha.

My grandmother and her siblings are examples. They always have a smile and a word of encouragement for people, and boy do they know how to laugh and have fun.

They bring light into a dark world. I see how they have passed it onto the rest of their family, like my Mom and her sister, who have always been great encouragers and lovers of people.

We need more people like that in this world. Even if we’re not, we can learn to be. Let’s learn to be like Letha. We should care about people at least as much as we do about dogs. Let’s be so uninhibited by our love for people that we can’t help but take both of our hands off the steering wheel to wave at someone we know.

When James Madison set about to draft the Bill of Rights — the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution — he was articulating what lawyers and philosophers and judges call “negative rights.” A positive right grants a privilege, like a driver’s license. A negative right restrains the government from interfering with a preexisting right. In order to emphasize his view that the freedom of speech preexisted the government, Madison insisted that the word “the” precede “freedom of speech” in the First Amendment.

If the freedom of speech preceded the government, where did it come from?

Speech is a natural right; it comes from our humanity. The framers of the Constitution and the ratifiers of the Bill of Rights understood and recognized this. Congress doesn’t grant the freedom of speech; rather it is prohibited absolutely from interfering with it. In the years following the ratification of the 14th Amendment, the courts began applying the restrictions in the First Amendment to the states and their municipalities and subdivisions.

Today, the First Amendment bars all government — federal, state and local — and all branches of government — legislative, executive and judicial — from interfering with the freedom of speech.

You’d never know this listening