Tag Archives: humanity

Fact Checking Kindness.

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By: Chris Warren.

The internet enables the average person to access more data from their smartphone than could be stored in an entire large university research library twenty years ago. Lost in the excitement of holding all civilized wisdom in one’s hand is the reality that the internet also provides a platform for dishonesty that, when mixed with just enough actual facts and spread around far enough, will sound completely plausible.

This week’s Twenty First Summer article started out as a thoughtful introspection about Glen Buratti, a six year old autistic boy who was cruelly snubbed on his birthday by his entire kindergarten class. During the process of reading up on the story and planning my article, I noticed a familiar plot shaping up: A victimized child, a mother openly wishing she could make it right, and an internet full of complete strangers coming to the rescue. Spoiler alert: It has a happy ending.

But that’s not where I’m going with this. The familiar plot was a tipoff: These stories occasionally go the wrong way. Everyone has heard of someone running to the media or the internet with a heart-tugging tale. The tale goes viral, attracting huge levels of support and attention and money, only for it to turn out later that they lied about the whole thing. I’ve grown cynical in my internet old age. Even a cute little kid doesn’t get an automatic free pass out of me. I always turn to my old friend google to cross-check everything lest I too become just another sucker who got duped into propagating an endless chain of electronic fiction.

As hard as I tried, I could not bust the Glenn Buratti story. There were some odd aspects to it that didn’t quite line up, but no big gotcha! There wasn’t even a little gotcha! Part of me felt relieved this wasn’t a scam. It is one of those feel-good stories affirming my faith that humanity doesn’t totally suck after all. I wanted it to be true. Another part of me felt like a cad for questioning Glenn’s mother’s motives in the first place. Maybe I should have no reason to feel bad because being suspicious is part of modern life, or at least it should be.

pinocchio-how-to-make-yourself-into-a-human-lie-detectorSo that’s where I’m at: Validate everything, especially if I’m going to use it as the topic of a blog article. That old fashioned sense of giving everyone the benefit of a doubt doesn’t work the way it did in days past. I’m not naive enough to think dishonesty is new concept, nor will I be guilt-tripped because I checked my facts before I put my byline on something for the whole world to see. The internet has made it easy to confirm truth, it’s also made it easy to bury a lie. President Ronald Reagan’s maxim, “trust but verify” no longer applies only to nuclear disarmament agreements.

Beyond the obvious moral lesson that kindness always trumps the mean spirited, the Glenn Buratti story  also teaches that it’s not a wise policy to accept someone at their word. There are so many scams and flim-flams out there; it poisons the well for any honest person in need who wants to be taken seriously. At the other end of the transaction are generous people who want to help but are holding back on the possibility they are being played. I still believe in compassion, empathy, and humanity toward others. Since I hold all of mankind’s knowledge in the palm of my hand, I’m going to to make sure there is enough truth to warrant my good will before I invest any heart and soul into someone else’s tears.

The Didactic Silence of Sir Nicholas Winton.

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By Chris Warren.

Rare is the man who does something great and keeps it to himself. In a time of instant gratification and “likes” and ever escalating public self affirmations, simply doing the right thing only because it’s the right thing and not for recognition seems like an anachronism. A lot of people perform good deeds —which is awesome— and then go and brag about it, usually on the internet. It’s almost as if they are really doing it for themselves and the benefit to others is merely a pleasant side effect.

In late 1939 Nicholas Winton was a young English stockbroker looking forward to a leisurely ski trip in Switzerland when at the last moment he changed his plans and went to Prague, Czechoslovakia instead to help a friend with humanitarian work. Hitler was marching across Europe and there were a lot of innocent bystanders, particularly children. On a whim and with no resources, experience, or diplomatic contacts, Winton remained in Prague for months and singlehandedly arranged safe passage to England for 669 Jewish children who would have otherwise been murdered by the Nazis.

For fifty years, Winton never told anyone about what he did. In the late 1980s, his wife found a scrap book with detailed evidence of her husband’s pre-war rescue effort. Only then did the rest of the world find out about Nicholas Winton’s amazing act of altruism. On a BBC television program he was reunited with some of the kids he saved, who by then were senior citizens with children and grandchildren of their own. Until that time none of them knew the backstory of how they ended up in England or who was responsible for whisking them to safety before the Nazis came.

Since then, Winton was knighted by the Queen of England and has been given so many other awards and honors it’s hard to list them all. There are statues memorializing his work; a school in Czechoslovakia and an asteroid in outer space are named after him. Through all this, Sir Nicholas Winton has kept his composure and acknowledges his selfless deed only when asked about it. He comes from an era when there was no internet or social media, but I think even if it were an option in 1939, Winton would not have been on Facebook congratulating himself and fishing for “likes”.  After all, he kept it to himself for half a century and reluctantly talked about it only after someone else outed him.

“When you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward.” (Matthew 6:2)

Winton is not known to be a religious person but those of devout faith can learn a lot from his attitude. He had no ulterior motives and did what he did solely because it was right and good. I believe there are others like Winton out there today; you will seldom hear about them because they are looking beyond their own presumptuous egos and don’t concern themselves with being noticed. Christianity teaches that those who boast about their good deeds will receive no Heavenly reward beyond their own bragging. If that’s true, and I believe it is, then Sir Nicholas Winton’s humble and understated life says more about him than any self indulgent internet platitudes could ever approach.

 

Strong Enough To Throw A Star.

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By: Chris Warren.

There is a well known story by American author Loren Eiseley (1907-1977) that goes something like this:

“There was an old man who would take a walk on the beach every morning before he began his work. One day, he was walking after a big storm had passed and found the vast beach littered with starfish as far as the eye could see, stretching in both directions. He noticed a small boy approaching. As the boy walked closer, the man could see that he was occasionally bending down to pick up an object and throw it into the sea. The boy came closer and the man called out, ‘Good morning! May I ask what it is that you are doing?’ The young boy paused, looked up, and replied ‘Throwing starfish into the ocean. The storm has washed them up onto the beach and they can’t return to the sea by themselves,’ the youth replied. ‘They will die, unless I throw them back into the water.’ The old man replied, ‘But there must be tens of thousands of starfish on this beach. I’m afraid you won’t really be able to make much of a difference.’ The boy bent down, picked up yet another starfish and threw it as far as he could into the ocean. Then he turned, smiled and said, ‘It made a difference to that one!’” (adapted from The Star Thrower, 1969, 1977).

Numerous versions of this story are floating around out there, but the lesson is the same: Very few of us will change the world for everyone, but one person can make a difference to someone, and to that someone it’s a very big deal.

In 1991 Cathy was a middle aged working mom with four kids who earned a modest living as a call center service rep at a large company. A few blocks up the street from her office was a well worn and austere apartment building used for low income senior housing. Owned & operated by a local faith-based charity that clearly had more good intentions than money, nobody would choose to live there unless the alternative was a cardboard box by the railroad tracks.

One day Cathy recruited a coworker to help her deliver a chair to a friend over lunch break. They pulled up to the senior housing building in Cathy’s beat up old minivan with a large padded recliner chair crammed in the back. The coworker was a strong, young twenty-something male specifically chosen to provide the muscle needed to lug the heavy piece up several floors to an apartment door in a dark hallway.

A weak old lady answered the door and warmly hugged and greeted Cathy. As they entered, the lady candidly mentioned, “I think I had a little accident in the bed.” There is no delicate way to describe it: Wall to wall, floor to ceiling , the place smelled, literally, like shit. The young guy set the chair near the window; it looked out of place as the only decent piece of furniture in the entire apartment. He waited uncomfortably while Cathy helped the lady change in the other room and hoped they didn’t know that he knew about the wretched, disgusting funk in the air. His courtesy of feigning ignorance was pointless since there was no possible way not to notice the “accident.” There was some idle chit-chat, and the pair of coworkers headed for the door. On the way out, Cathy tells the old lady, “I hope you like your chair. I’ll come by later and finish cleaning up. You’ll be ok till then.”

On the short trip back to the office, Cathy explained to the visibly puzzled young man that she met the old woman months back through a random encounter at the store and simply “adopted” her. At the end of the workday, Cathy returned to the dumpy apartment to take care of her friend; he went to his clean, odor-free home in a nice neighborhood.

Star-throwers are hard to spot because they deliberately avoid being noticed. Like mysterious little spirits, they quietly go about performing good deeds. The boy on the beach didn’t say anything about what he was doing until someone asked, and Cathy did not disclose the true purpose of the lunch hour chair-moving mission to her young helper until the topic could no longer be avoided.

Nearly everyone at some point in their life has helped others. Lots of people are habitually helpful, but not everyone is a star-thrower. True star-throwers go beyond doing something nice once in a while. They instinctively see stars that others miss. In a world that is so difficult for so many, stars should be easy to find like the beach in Eiseley’s parable. But in the real world they can and often do hide in plain sight. People in need may mask their difficulties, be too embarrassed to ask for help, or be in denial that they have a problem. More likely, many of us don’t want to notice the stars all around.

Loren Eiseley teaches that the need is far greater than one person can handle and admonishes lazy bystanders through the character of the old man. Sooner or later the boy must stop throwing starfish. He feels sorrow for all those he did not get to and guilt for leaving them behind but knows that at least some of them are safely back in the water. Compare that to the attitude of the old man, who not only saw no higher purpose in throwing starfish to begin with but also has the nerve to tell the boy that it’s better to let them all die than to save just a few.! Uncharitable people often use this twisted logic to explain away their lack of compassion. It’s easy to say the job is too big and assuage one’s guilt for not even trying than to give one’s best effort and know it would have mattered to someone. Mocking others for doing what you are too unmotivated to take on yourself is an old bit.

When I agreed to help move the chair, it never entered my mind that doing an ordinary favor was going to result a lesson that I would remember for years and years. I later lost contact with Cathy but her sense of humanity and kindness and showing love to God by showing love to others will never leave me. There are so many stars. Like the boy on the beach, Cathy knows she will never save all of them. The apartment building is still there. I seriously doubt the old lady is alive. She was in her late 70s or early 80s at the time. This incident happened twenty three years ago. Either by luck or divine intent two souls were both in the right place at the right time and again proved the old man wrong. A Star-Thrower made a difference to a poor,  sick, elderly lady who was tossed back into the life giving sea so she would not whither and die on a beach.