I like coming across stories of people helping one another. I have two favorites. They hardly share any traits in common, but as different as they are, there is courage in both.
The first one is fictional and comes from a West Wing episode. During the episode, the deputy chief of staff, Josh, has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Leo, the Chief of Staff, a recovering alcoholic, tells Josh a story:
“This guy’s walking down the street when he falls in a hole.
The walls are so steep he can’t get out.“A doctor passes by and the guy shouts up, ‘Hey you. Can you help me out?’
The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole and moves on.“Then a priest comes along and the guy shouts up, ‘Father, I’m down in this hole can you help me out?’
The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on.“Then a friend walks by, ‘Hey, Joe, it’s me can you help me out?’
And the friend jumps in the hole.
Our guy says, ‘Are you stupid? Now we’re both down here.’The friend says, ‘Yeah, but I’ve been down here before and I know the way out.’”
I think it’s a story that translates well across time, cultures, and geography. It is universal. It is spatial and simple: there’s a hole. There are finite dimensions, a limited amount of light. There’s isolation. Maybe when you hear the story, you’ll imagine a hole that’s wider, deeper, as deep as the Chilean mine where thirty-three men were trapped. Maybe yours has a different ratio of light to dark. The meaning remains the same. Helping means guiding someone out of the depths.
Helping, in this case, also relies on past experience. Medicine and religion, here, isn’t of any use. The story reminds me of Plato and his vision for philosopher-kings: having seen the Sun-lit world, a few return to the cave to unchain the others, to lead them to the world outside.
I’m not only drawn to the universal and the fictional, but also to the national and the actual. I’ve thought about this many times since I read it. A man, Innes, saw an older man slumped over the steering wheel and thought:
“Basic physics: If I could get in front of him and let him hit me, the delta difference in speed would just be a few miles an hour, and we could slow down together.”
Because of Innes, no one will ever know the magnitude of damage caused by a man speeding headlong into cross-traffic.
The story is one of the most original I’ve ever heard, and astonishing in how American it seems. Someone at Rachel Maddow’s blog must have agreed. The link to the story is filed under smart-is-an-american-value. This particular applied physics is unique to its time and place.
Many of us could use an Innes to match our velocity, get in front; before we reach a busy intersection, the collision of his car into ours slows us all down.
