Maddow showed these people from around the world, China and the UK, Iceland and Taiwan, LA and Brazil, Israel and Cuba. The BBC too described some of them, sitting on planes snowed in at airports while airline workers labored to get them out as quickly as possible, clearing runways. This is when it makes sense to me that we have in place militaries and trained corps of individuals whose roles are rigidly and clearly defined. Just as we each often find that we can handle more than we think, that we can keep our heads in circumstances we think would break us, we seem to do this as a species. Or perhaps we choose to do this as a species.
It's the innate and internalized response that I see every couple of days in the city: emergency vehicle sirens blare, approach. Traffic slows imperceptibly as each driver takes note and figures out the direction of the sound and where to move. And then, of a sudden, all the cars are pulled to the sides, the path is cleared, and the people whose vocation it is to live in the adrenaline rush of ticking clocks and drama rush past. And we resume, with little more than a blink of a thought to the systems in place. The hierarchies of how to deal with chaos and dying and living and false alarms.
When I see this, when I see the unspoken movement of people on the bus to help and clear the way for a parent with stroller and children, or a wheelchair, my heart is full. It's more active and more thoughtful than holding the door for someone or thanking a store clerk. There are decisions to be made, even minute, about where the stroller can fit, how many seats the children need. There are those who move out of the best seats to clear a few together, others who get up and fold up the seats to clear way for the stroller and bags, another who might help the parent lift the stroller onto the bus. There is no conversation -- this is public transit and there is a certain privacy we afford to one another -- but it gets done each time. And when it doesn't start to happen on its own, when its infrequent riders or people too engrossed in books in the key seats, there is something that jumpstarts it, looks or throat clearings or the sense of all the rest of the eyes on the bus communicating a silent honk to get a move on.
I want to harness the empathy and action of the species here. This is where we look out for each other. This is where the woman nine months pregnant and the elderly man with a walker and groceries argues about who should get the seat. This is the dance where we take turns lifting each other up or being lifted, accepting help graciously or offering it with an open heart, creating those tiny bonds between us. When I slipped coming off the bus in the snow and ice and night, my heavy backpack rendering me a graceless flailing beetle, a flight of hands lifted me up so quickly I wouldn't've known I'd fallen if it hadn't been for the snow on the back of my pants. It was like the graceful creatures of wings and eyeballs and goodness in Madeline L'Engles "A Swiftly Tilting Planet" that I read in gradeschool. There was no individual person to thank, no need to. Just a flurry of hands, teeny connections, as we switched places.
After hurricane Katrina, I was trying to organize relief efforts in a large church downtown, near a significant homeless population, the kind stable enough that we refer to it as a "camp". I knew, as I set up a table with information and sign-up sheets, that the homeless individuals often came in for the donuts and coffee along with the parishioners, and I was nervous, feeling guilty. What would they think, the chronically homeless, the men and women whom I saw every time I crossed the street at those corners, the ones who I occasionally (but not often enough) shared food and talk with? Would they see me as the problem, eager to alleviate homelessness as long as it didn't have a face, the further away the better?
Perhaps some of them felt that way. I certainly would've understood. As the first man I recognized from those corners approached me, I tensed up, feeling guilty and contrite until he opened his mouth. What, he asked, could he do to help? He had worked construction, didn't have a job or family to keep him here and could go right away. What busses were leaving and when? The empathy was tangible and the only apologies were his, for not having money to donate.
A sense of kinship with one another seems to be the default position, especially those in distress. Somehow politics and the complexities of helping to change the world get in the way and we devolve into blithering arguing bumbling idiots caught up in ideologies and economic systems and our own self-righteousness. Paralyzed by each cog calling to task the others until the machine of humanity seems poised to self-destruct.
And then catastrophe happens, chaos of nature made deadly by our own failings in planning, in long-term aid, in regional squabbling centuries of politics. And we sit up straight again in our seats as the sirens blare, clear a way for first responders, second responders. We text our money from bank accounts to charities, read articles about countries we've nearly forgotten, say frantic prayers, curse our politicians or theirs. We cling to the news stories, even through the pain and confusion. It's an apology for having almost forgotten you, Haiti. It's a desire to suffer with you, to hear your story, to be mud upon the bee sting and draw the stinger out for you, keep the swelling down.
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