The late civil rights leader and congressman John Lewis liked to talk about the necessity for getting into “good trouble” —the moral duty for good people to go about their lives by comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable — and in that spirit of the human need to seek redemption in a broken world, he had much in common with his friend Rosalynn Carter, who died last week.
While most Americans remember the former first lady for her visible public advocacy for mental health and human rights — including her leadership of President Carter’s Commission on Mental Health, which led to passage of the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980 — few understood how much she was able to accomplish on that mission by exercising her formidable influence behind the scenes, leaving credit to others when it meant ensuring that the most vulnerable among us were cared for and protected from harm. I was privileged to watch her quietly work that complicated political room once, though on an international scale, with a profound impact on the lives of thousands of people.
