Fighting for the People

After, though, walking home, my feet grew heavy. By the time I reached the front step, not only my feet but the world itself seemed to have turned to lead; the door to the apartment literally took all my strength to open. Before I could say anything, my brother did something unusual—maybe even unprecedented—he apologized for everything. Stunned, I sat down across from him on the furniture we had—a bed and a chair—and talked. Suddenly, the room felt warm and bright and friendly. I’d made an unprecedented decision, picking faith instead of a fist fight, and my brother, in turn, had responded in a way he never had.

It was not long after this that I took on leadership and began making my first sustaining contributions to the SGI. If I had to say what drove me, I’d say it was a burning curiosity: I wanted to see just how much I could grow as a human being; how much I could support this movement and society. 

Ann, I recall, had a similar prayer, which showed itself in the flower plots around the Buddhist center. An avid gardener, I’d often find her kneeling in one of them, tending to the weeds. “You’ve got to get at the root,” she’d explain, by which she meant not only garden variety weeds, but metaphorical ones too—those deeply rooted tendencies in our lives that, left unaddressed, can choke our full potential. We began dating a few years after we met, and a few years after that, we married, in the summer of 1985.

Every year that followed, Ann and I sat across the kitchen table to talk. Whatever challenges we faced—in raising our two sons and sending them to college, in me landing a competitive role at a federal agency supervising banks and returning to school to keep it—Ann and I sat down and faced it squarely, to plan for the year ahead and set ambitious goals. In everything, we were ambitious—we wanted to feel a stretch, to aim for what we knew would not be easy. After years of Buddhist practice, we knew that this was where real growth would happen. 

And thank goodness we did so. Because I was about to draw on every year of my Buddhist practice to respond at a crucial moment, in 2008, when the economy collapsed. Overnight, my tiny team of six staff was called on to respond to the failure of dozens and eventually hundreds of banks, guaranteeing the deposits of countless ordinary people caught in a crisis that was not of their making.

When people think of this crisis, what usually comes to mind are the names of the large institutions that went under. But what people don’t often think of are the countless smaller banks—in rural towns, for instance—that were unwittingly swept up in the failings of others.

The pace of collapse accelerated dramatically in the first few weeks, one small bank going under after another—sometimes nearly a dozen in one day. My workday grew long—14 hours, then 16. 

Frankly speaking, there were moments I did feel like something might give from the daily strain. But when I felt this way, I took a moment to study Nichiren Daishonin’s writings and chant. And I’d be reminded that this was my time to respond to my mentor’s many years of training and guidance; it was a time to fight for the people.

Within months, the team I oversaw grew from a skeleton six-person crew in Maryland to a team of 160 in offices spanning the entire country. To this day, the work we did is understood to have greatly contributed to the preservation of confidence in the economic system.

You’d think after this that I’d have learned how to fight the right way. But just two years later, in 2010, my supervisor and I were at loggerheads. All my old tendencies surfaced every time we met, and I found myself more and more inclined to fight fire with fire. 

It wasn’t until I shared what I was going through at a discussion meeting that one of our precious seniors in faith walked up and completely transformed my perspective. 

“That’s wonderful,” she told me. “You’re getting paid to do your human revolution!” 

That took a minute to sink in, but then I couldn’t help but catch her contagious smile. She was right—how unbelievably fortunate was I! This shifted my prayer, and I began to see my work as the arena of my human revolution. This changed the way that I responded to my supervisor and so eventually changed the way she responded to me. When I retired in 2020, I was known as someone who could make an ally of even the fiercest adversary.

In 2022, Ann passed of cancer, something I am grieving still. Leading up to her death, she enjoyed many hours tending to a beautiful garden, one I’ve done my best to maintain. Just the other day, I spent the morning working on the lawn, which I realized was overdue for a weeding. I was tempted to make short work of them with the Weedwacker but set it down. I remembered what she always told me, that we’ve got to tackle weeds at the root. Only then can a garden grow without bounds.

October 10, 2025 World Tribune, p. 5