Sam Levinson, that wonderful hilarious writer who could tug on your heartstrings and tickle your funnybone with one sentence, said that his mother used to say, “If everybody swept their own front steps, the whole world would be clean.”

This can be taken literally, or it can be made into a very effective allegory; you pick one.  I’ve chosen both.

I do not, and will not ever, understand people who don’t keep their own front steps clean.  It’s not hard.  Think how beautiful the world would be if everybody kept their own front steps clean.  Think how it would look.  Think how it would SMELL – like beauty and goodness and conscientiousness and honesty and hard work and, well, like nice people.  Are there really people who don’t understand this concept?

It’s true that it can all seem impossible – that one’s environment has deteriorated to the point that individuals feel powerless to do anything about it, but that’s not true.  It isn’t true.  Every seemingly impossible thing in all of history has been accomplished by individuals who saw that it needed to be invented or discovered or simply just DONE, so they did it.

If everybody swept their own front steps, the whole world would be clean.  Absolute truth in a few simple words.

It’s about education, isn’t it.  It’s all about education.

By the way, if you haven’t read his books, run, RUN, for the bookstore.  You just can’t waste any more minutes not knowing them practically by heart.  Yes, they are that good.

“Everything But Money” (my favorite), “In One Era and Out the Other,” “You Don’t Have To Be In Who’s Who To Know What’s What” . . . Sam Levinson’s books are classically wonderful.  You’ll laugh out loud, and you’ll cry out loud, too.  Mostly, you will laugh.  I can’t recommend these books highly enough.

The books are old, OLD, and I don’t know if they are out of print or not.  However, they are all still available on Amazon; I just checked.

It’s too bad, isn’t it, that so many people in this world are perfectly content to live with dirty front steps.  I wonder why that is. . . . .