A life’s incarnations
By John Young
the Waco Tribune-Herald
December 17, 2001
Reproduced by permission
WACO, Texas — Obituaries are cave drawings of the printing-press age.
They tell that someone passed through on this plane. They show some function — hunter, gatherer, tiller of soil — little else.
When Jack Hansma died, I realized how little the hieroglyphics meant to me.
I didn’t think of him as a health educator, which he was, retiring from Baylor University in 1988. What I knew of him was as a citizen. “Activist” doesn’t overstate it, but doesn’t fit, either, because that almost conveys confrontation, which is not what Jack Hansma was about. He was about peace and justice, and charity. To him the meaning of justice was not the end result of prosecution but the empowerment of the powerless.
Reading his obituary I was surprised to see how many stations Jack had before I got to know him as a citizen. After serving in World War II and completing graduate work, he was a professor in several universities. He started health education programs at the University of Northern Colorado, University of Arizona, Sacramento State and then Baylor, where he worked almost 20 years. To me all of that moving and shaking did not compute. Jack Hansma was just the polite man who’d come to drop off some information about the need for health-care reform or a cleaner environment.
I met him several years ago at a program sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee. The focus was America’s enormous disparity in wealth, how trickle-down tax policies and corporate welfare made the gap wider. He wrote a few Waco Herald Tribune guest columns on subjects like that. Like the distance swimmer that he was until days before his death at 83, Jack was always moving forward, face down, legs kicking, breathing regular. And like a good swimmer, he knew the secret of equilibrium. Though comfortably situated, he balanced everything he did with an eye for a simple lifestyle and concern for the less fortunate.
At his funeral one of his sons, who knew how committed Jack and wife Kay were to charity, expressed his shock to find more than 100 charities on the Hansmas’ giving list for a single year. Also at the funeral the Hansma’s financial adviser told of a risky stock move on which Jack insisted with the market at rock bottom. Why the risk? “The more I make, the more I can give away,” he said.
Those are dimensions of this extraordinary citizen. Though I have trouble thinking of Jack Hansma “on the job,” he was always working — toward a better community and world. One of the blights of the modern era is specialization, and nose-to-grindstone fixation on what we do to pay our bills. Too many of us are content to have our occupation define us. Too many of us are content to each focus on a special interest or skill. Of course, the opportunity to do otherwise is available to all, through volunteer work, charity, being a pro-active neighbor, involving one’s self in a service organization or youth programs.
The opportunity is also there to broaden one’s grasp, to read widely and approach the world with curiosity. In an age of specialization, the world needs more generalists, and people who not content to be defined by the painting on the cave wall.