Words have power. The right ones are like a nuclear blast to the soul. Try this:

Fuck you!

How does that make you feel?

Now try this:

I love you.

I love you because you’re human. You feel. You strive. You are a beautiful soul that was created by God to make the world a better place. And you can do that.

I’ll bet you had a reaction to those words too.

Here are some more words:

If your reaction was “I cannot”, you should know that you’re full of it, and that’s what keeps you from acting. You’re doing it to yourself.

I just wrote a news story about people with developmental disabilities, and I found out the truth, the big truth of the world and humanity, the much vaunted “meaning of life”, by talking to a bunch of people who society in its collective lack of wisdom has mislabeled “disabled”. It may sound like pc babble, but these people are, in absolute truth, ‘differently abled’.

I spoke to a woman with developmental disabilities who has bowled 134 and can remember the birthdays of everyone she knows, and a bunch of other dates as well. I have a degree from the University of Michigan and I’m generally considered a pretty smart cookie. And I can’t do either of those things.

She makes teddy bears for kids with cancer.

Imagine a child with a frightening illness, in pain, in fear, in a hospital, in treatment instead of on the playground. Imagine that someone makes that child smile, if even for a moment, if that smile alleviates the pain, even for a moment, if holding that teddy bear makes an injection hurt less or scare less, even for a moment. For that moment, the world is a better place.

And the world got to be a better place because someone who is generally perceived as needing help herself, made it that way.

Imagine a woman faraway in Bangladesh whose family is hungry. She has no money to buy food. She cannot go to the grocery store. She goes alone with a bowl to a harvested rice field to glean what she can to feed her family.

It’s far away. We don’t know her. We don’t know what it’s like to have no money for food. But we know what it’s like to want to provide for our children. If we open our hearts, there is a horror there, a genuine horror at the truth that some parents, people who only want everything for their kids, just like us, can’t even feed their babies.

They’re not bums. They are the victims of drought and war and famine. And every day, they wonder if they will be able to feed their children, wonder if they will watch their babies die of disease and starvation.

Are you the person who is going to drop everything and use all your resources to get aid to these people? Are you going to fight a war to overthrow oppressive regimes that starve their own citizens? Are you going to shrug your shoulders, suppress the horror and say “it has nothing to do with me” because you “can’t”?

Are you going to get out your checkbook? If words have power, and money talks........

Are you going to tell me that it’s too little?

When I was young and idealistic I used to knock on doors to tell people about the dangers threatening our drinking water. At that time, people would tell me that they had city water, so it was o.k. Sounds funny now, doesn’t it? It’s funny now because so many of us knocked on doors, so many idealistic college students knocked on one door at a time, collected, on the average, five or so dollars per house, and used the money to hire lobbyists and media professionals to make an issue of it.

And it became an issue. It was taken up by the government and the media eventually, not because they made it an issue, but because we did, one house at a time, five dollars at a time, one newspaper or radio station phone call at a time.

One word, one dollar, one phone call, one letter, one teddy bear at a time, the world becomes a better place.

I love you because you do have it in you.