We Are Coming to Save Us
Hope, Humility, and Heroism
In the summer of 2020, I abruptly got promoted to PTA president when our then-president, a nurse, was moved to the frontlines of her hospital’s ICU. I felt completely at sea, unsure what to do or how to help. In a panic, I signed up for about a million newsletters and Facebook groups and just tried to stay on top of the most urgent demands in our community.
All of our schools were struggling, but my kids’ elementary school was hit especially hard as our student body is largely poor and we have several immigrant groups with varying degrees of English proficiency. Our PTA was using our limited resources primarily to ensure that our free and reduced lunch kids got food even though the school was closed. That fall, when our district finally provided laptops, PTA worked with the school to help get families hooked up to the internet.
After all that heavy lifting, I thought we were done. But when we started our back-to-school meetings, another problem cropped up. In-person, we’d seat families by language. The main speaker would present in English, then interpreters would simultaneously interpret in Spanish, Somali, Vietnamese, and Mandarin. But simultaneous interpretation didn’t work online. Instead, we’d have the teacher or principal speak, then we’d wait while it was translated, one-by-one, into each of our other four main languages. A meeting scheduled for one hour stretched to two, and then finally had to be cut off, half of its agenda unfinished.
The situation was untenable. We tried having the interpreters run a conference call while the meeting was going on but ran into snag after snag. Good communication between school staff and parents is a big factor in a student’s academic success, but with so many families struggling to pay bills, sitting through hours of meetings wasn’t going to work.
Then one of those million newsletters came through. I don’t even remember signing up for the Southerners on New Ground newsletter (I am not a Southerner!) but one day I saw them advertise a free workshop on how to do interpretation on Zoom. It was focused on non-profits, but I went anyway. When they showed us how to use the interpretation channels, I was psyched, but knew our school could never afford the pricey account required to run interpretation. In a hail Mary attempt, I posted about it in a Facebook group for Title One School PTAs in Seattle.
What happened next was a total shocker: people took the information and ran with it. A local non-profit figured out how we could band our PTAs together to pay for the account, others stepped up to make detailed instructions (with screenshots!) on how to run interpretation in a meeting. Our language communities helped us find interpreters who then trained on how to use the new technology. Within a few weeks all the PTAs in south Seattle were using this feature. We’re still using it.
It’s the type of story that’s often overlooked. Our culture has many narratives of one man’s fight to survive in a disaster against great odds, usually featuring plenty of violence and social darwinism. But while that story makes an exciting movie, is it true to life?
Author Rebecca Solnit would say no. Solnit has done extensive reporting about what happens in the aftermath of both natural and man-made disasters. This month as I’ve been thinking about hope, I’m reading her Hope in the Dark: Untold Stories, Wild Possibilities. In it, Solnit writes about people fleeing the twin towers on 9/11:
“…in all the hundreds of oral histories I read and the many interviews I conducted to research my book, A Paradise Built in Hell, I could find no one saying he or she was abandoned or attacked in that great exodus. People were frightened and moving fast, but not in a panic. Careful research has led disaster sociologists to the discovery—one of their many counterstereotypical conclusions—that panic is a vanishingly rare phenomenon in disasters, part of an elaborate mythology of our weakness.”
In the aftermath of the attack, we focus often on the many deaths. Less well known are the stories that Solnit shares: a Hasidic Jew helping a fallen Pakistani Muslim, strangers who guided a blind newspaper vendor home, teachers safely evacuating and sheltering their students, and John Abruzzo, a quadriplegic whose coworkers carried him down sixty-nine flights of stairs to safety.
9/11 was a story of great evil, but it’s also a story of incredible courage and selflessness. It is darkness and it is hope.
Last week, reader
made an astute comment about the dangers of hope,“Hope is necessary to prevent the complacency that results from despair, but it can itself lead to complacency, when people hope in some magical saving activity that absolves them from taking any action to make the hoped for thing come about.”
Clint highlights a weakness in the hope argument: what’s the difference between hope and magical thinking/delusion? I’ve been wrestling with this, and here’s what I’ve come up with: magical thinking is saying “Someone is coming to save me.” It’s a spiritually immature way of looking at the world, saying we don’t have to deal with a problem because someone else is going to take care of it. It’s saying that Jesus is coming back soon, so we don’t have to reduce our carbon footprint.
Hope, on the other hand, is like saying, “we are coming to save us.” It requires:
Honesty: to assess the problem at hand and the resources available
Humility: to admit what we don’t know/have and to seek out help
Relationships: no individual can do everything; we need to rely on our community to fill in our gaps
Imagine the terror quadriplegic John Abruzzo must have felt when the elevators went out in the towers that day. I don’t know how long it took for his coworkers to rally around him, but their determination makes me think they must not have hesitated: even when firefighters met them on the nineteenth floor and offered to take over, they refused to leave Abruzzo’s side. They weren’t going to leave him behind, even if it put themselves in danger.
I have to believe it’s human nature to help and care for one another. What’s unnatural are the things that get in the way of this desire: the pressures of capitalism, the incursion of technology (especially social media) in how we built community, the strange new trend among some Christians to demonize empathy. But where systems of disconnection and exploitation thrive, there are also people working to dismantle and replace these systems with those that prioritize care.
What are you seeing that gives you hope these days? How do you define hope? What about magical thinking?
BONUS MATERIALS:
Check out Clint Redwood’s substack, Anterograde Apologetics
the John Abruzzo story is a quick, inspiring read. I wonder if the WTC worker who ordered the EVAC+ chair knows they saved lives?
and, just in time for the December madness:
Yes to all of this! I've been thinking about this so much right now, and you've inspired me to go sign up for one of the rapid response trainings to protect neighbors (especially families coming and going from school) from possible ICE raids. (maybe we can go together?)
I love the Rebecca Solnit story. I recently read her talk about John Abruzzo's rescue on 9/11 in Paradise Built in Hell (an amazing book with similar points - about how much people tend to calmly take care of each other in crisis). The story made me cry - not just because of how much my family will rely on the help of strangers in a crisis (I already knew that), but because Abruzzo's story surprised me so much... I realized that in my fear-spirals, I don't often imagine strangers putting themselves at risk to rescue my kid. It's a good reminder.
Thanks for this writing. We will save ourselves!
This is so beautiful. 👏🏽 👏🏽 and your story about zoom interpreters 😭
We are coming to save us!