San Diego Harbor across from where the American Public Health Association met.

If hospital systems are like yacht clubs, public health people would live unnoticed in one of the Winnebago’s across the parking lot (that’s ours on the left)). Why would anyone choose a career so likely to end up in a dumpy office filled with data? It isn’t just ancient people with nothing better to do with a drab and pathetic life. Public health degrees are the 5th most heavily sought out of 500 by the current generation of students. Why?

It is normal to want to live a life worthy and helpful to the world. But it not  easy in these days so filled with repellent public behavior among those supposed to be leading us. You have to craft a life on purpose, sort of like a salmon has to swim against the fierce current.

See2See Road Trip began in San Diego precisely because those are our peeps! And because they love all peeps–publicly! In a drab room overlooking the yacht, I shared with a room of public health advocacy wonks some words about love, borrowed and adapted shamelessly from Paul:

If I speak in the voice of powerful people or spirits but do not have loving kindness, I am only a distracting noise. 2If I have predictive data and interdisciplinary analytics that give me confidence to move mountains of poverty, but am not kind, I am nothing. 3If I proudly commit to radical levels of community benefit and take on huge obligations for the health of the public, but am not humbled by love, I do nothing.

4The love that life needs is patient and kind. It does not envy others’ projects, it does not boast of our own ministries, it is not proud. 5It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of who ran up the debt and who got more. 6Loving kindness does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always finds a way. (Sounds like public damn health!!)

8Love never quits. Where we have predictions and projections, they will cease; where there are speeches, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.

9For we know in part and we predict in part, 10but when living complexity comes, what is partial disappears. 11When we were young in our work we talked like beginners, and thought like a beginners, reasoned like a novice. When I became a grown-ups, we put the ways of childhood behind.

12For now we see only dimly as if looking at an eclipse toward the hidden sun, as through a smokey haze; then we shall see it all directly. Now we know a bit; then we may know fully, even as our own lives will be fully known.

13And now these three remain in life: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

The Public Health Advocacy leadership is about 150 uber-nerds (our favorites!!) giving their time and resting their hopes on standing up and speaking out for a range of public health priorities. They hone their technical skills at the craft of communicating and persuading. Not entirely like the preachers working 4.8 miles to the south east on sunday morning. One of them said “people don’t care what you know until they know how you care.”

Love is what works; the only thing that works. Especially in hard-hearted times.