Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

by Pete Buttigieg

This vision of justice is often compared to being asked how you would want a cake to be divided if you did not know which piece will be yours: equally, of course.

But for others, work can only be meaningful if its fundamental purpose is in things that would matter even if no one would pay you to care about them.

If there’s a child on the South Side of Chicago that can’t read, that makes a difference in my life even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen on the West Side of Chicago who can’t afford her prescription medicine . . . that makes my life poorer even if it’s not my grandparent.

Good policy, like good literature, takes personal lived experience as its starting point.

And as with everything else, I got better at it with practice.

(If you think this is absurd, envision what a European historian eight hundred years from now will think about photos of us celebrating the Resurrection of Christ by placing terrified children on the laps of man-sized Easter bunnies in late twentieth century American shopping malls.)

“You want to know what the secret to my ribs is?” Smiling, mostly with his eyes, he disclosed the secret ingredient: “Patience.”

Obviously this can’t be endorsed as a way of dealing with these problems. But without exceptions to rules, the world would be a colder and probably worse place to live.

They also viewed his case differently because they actually knew him as a person, not as a stock character. Over time I’ve observed that we are more generous, supportive, and pleasant toward people we actually know than toward those we understand only as categories or groups.

AN ADVENTURE IS ONLY an inconvenience rightly considered,

to confront the dictatorship of chance, which compounds the cruelty of loss by allocating it for no clear reason at all.

it was clear that I would have to work harder than ever to make myself useful, after these reminders of the precariousness of existence

It heightens the desire for your life to make sense as a whole, not just from certain angles.