Rotary Welcomes Best-Selling Author John Green

RCB President Brenda Hackney with guest speaker John Green and his father-in-law, Rotarian Marshall Urist.

This week the Rotary Club of Birmingham welcomed guest speaker John Green, the award-winning, #1 bestselling author of books including The Fault in Our Stars, Turtles All the Way Down, and The Anthropocene Reviewed and co-creator of online video projects such as Vlogbrothers and Crash Course.

Green shared stories about the challenges he faced as an adolescent and the difference one teacher made in his life. He discussed the importance of mental health, the consequences of the internet and social media on young people, their need to be heard and understood, and how they are grappling with life as we emerge from the pandemic.

“The reason that teacher made such a difference in my life is because she heard me, even when I didn’t speak, she heard me,” Green said. “She listened to me. She knew I was in pain and she didn’t try to solve the pain, she acknowledged it and affirmed it…That is how she helped me be alright and how she helped me hold competing ideas in my mind at the same time—that I would and would not be okay, that life hurts and doesn’t, that the world is terrible and getting worse and lovely and getting better.”

Green explained the challenge of wrestling with competing ideas simultaneously, and the importance of listening to other's beliefs and experiences and understanding their perspectives.

"I truly believe that through empathy, through compassion, through non-judgmental listening, and through the true service that Rotary believes in, we can walk closer to that light, closer to understanding that all other people are as complexly and as multitudinously human as we are," Green said.