The BFD | Let Me Retell a Brief Story about Resilience

James O’Keefe
projectveritas.com

James O’Keefe established Project Veritas in 2011 as a non-profit journalism enterprise to continue his undercover reporting work. Today, Project Veritas investigates and exposes corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other misconduct in both public and private institutions to achieve a more ethical and transparent society.

These days, we all need to learn resilience.

This is my dad and I in the mid-1980s. Times were tough for our family:

To make ends meet, my mom would wake up at 4 am and head into the Bronx to work at a nursing home every day. Sometimes she took me with her…

Meanwhile, we lived in a ratty old house in NJ and my dad decided to fix it up by himself thinking he might rent half it out:

The house was in such bad shape it was almost condemned.

My dad solicited the help of my grandfather, James O’Keefe Senior, to perform a miracle.

My grandfather was dyslexic but could build things out of nothing with scrap materials salvaged from the side of the road. So that’s what he did:

The three of us began working when I was 5. In the beginning, I would just hand them tools:

My father was, to this day, the hardest working man I’ve ever met. People in town said things couldn’t be done — and he either found a way or he engineered a way.

He did everything himself and was intensely focused and driven to get the job done — so much so we didn’t make small talk while working.

As I got slightly older each year, I was forced to do more than hand them tools.

My grandfather would say to me, “You see, Irish,” as I stuck my arm down a disgusting pipe or shovelled dirt.

“You must do what it takes to survive.”

I didn’t understand.

He would monitor each swipe of a paintbrush and supervise me scraping 100-year-old wallpaper off a wall…

It was dirty work every weekend and some nights after school.

I spent some of the time dancing around and daydreaming.

When the house was finished, it was such an impressive achievement the State of New Jersey gave my parents an award:

Later on, a house fire came and destroyed most of what we spent so long building and restoring:

People in town, again, said the house couldn’t be saved.

My grandfather told my father, “It’ll be ok, we’ll bring it back.” He moved in with us and commenced work:

For the next two years, my sister, my mother, and my father went back to work doing much of the same work all over again.

My grandfather effectively never retired. He lived at home in the attic and stayed by my dad’s side working on ladders and putting up Sheetrock until his stroke at 80.