I collect these stories of individuals, campaigns, projects, organizations, with the hopes of countering the narrative that the world is full of evil, of harm, of people with malicious intentions and to inspire each of us to pursue our wildest dreams of providing un-egoed assistance to others.
If one person can be touched by the acts of others enough to inspire us to join them or to take on our own mission, this will be a perfect outcome.
Harm Reduction
Never Use Alone
The Never Use Alone hotline was set up so that drug users can call if they are say, using heroin by themselves. Someone will stay on the line with them in case they overdose. We hear the recording of one call, from a woman named Kimber. (13 minutes)
Everyday Heroes
Showcasing appropriate response
- NYC Subway hero
- Landlords helping renters apply for aid instead of evicting first, heard on All Things Considered, Sept 23, 2021
- Pretty much all of the Metropolitan Diary stories…
Sticky Situation
Dear Diary:
As I sat finishing a burger on the Dumbo pier while waiting for the ferry to come in, I watched tourists taking selfies and enjoying burgers of their own. We all were feeling happy and free.
I watched a sparrow hop toward a translucent, melted, gummy-candy blob that was stuck to the pier and peck its tiny beak into it.
To my surprise, it stayed there. No matter how much the bird flapped its wings, it was stuck. It tried to use its feet to leverage itself free, but only wound up getting its feet stuck too.
Someone must help this bird, I thought.
I stood up to look for someone who might come to the rescue, but no one else seemed to notice what was happening. My heart started pounding when I realized I was that someone.
I went over and spilled some seltzer on the bird’s beak, which allowed it to raise its head. I tried pouring a little on its feet, but they were too stuck for it to make a difference.
Thinking of all the reasons one might not touch a bird, I got out my handkerchief anyway and scooted the sparrow gently from behind. The bird popped off the blob and flew away.
My boat pulled in and I got on, just like everyone else, except that I felt like a hero.
— Michele Mirisola 1
To Be Kinder
Dear Diary:
It was the late 1960s, and I was attending Cooper Union at night and living in a tiny, shared apartment in the East Village.
I had become interested in Eastern thought and was trying to learn how to be kinder in my life. As part of that effort, I had just started attending yoga classes.
One day I took the bus between home and school because of heavy rain. The bus was crowded, but I had found a seat.
A man got on the bus and was standing near me dripping wet. He was muttering to himself, and I strained to hear what he was saying. He was complaining about his life.
“No one cares about me,” he said. “I am alone. No one cares. I don’t have anything.”
He mentioned that he didn’t even have an umbrella to protect him from the rain.
As he spoke, people looked at the floor or looked away. His voice got louder. My stop was coming up, and I didn’t know what to do.
Then, as I stood up and got ready to move toward the door, I handed the man my umbrella.
He shouted at me, asking me what this was.
This is for you, I said.
He asked why.
“Because I love you,” I mumbled.
What, he asked — as though he hadn’t heard me.
“Because I love you,” I shouted before jumping off the bus.
— Shanti Norris 2
lonely living on the streets
Walking to the library one day, I noticed a homeless woman muttering to herself. There was an aura of urine about her. She was missing several teeth.
When she spotted me, she asked for twenty dollars. My father taught me to never give homeless people money because “they’ll just use it for drugs and alcohol.” I wasn’t busy, so I sat down next to her on the sidewalk and asked, “how’s your day going?”
She launched into a tirade about why her life sucks—it was mostly incoherent and I assumed she was crazy. After about ten minutes, she paused. She skittishly made eye contact with me and said “sorry.”
“Why are you apologizing?”
“Well, sometimes I ramble. But that’s because I have no one to talk to.”
“It’s probably lonely living on the streets.”
“Yeah.”3
That Driver Could Be Your Mother
Compassion and rebirth are two traditional Buddhist tenets that both came together for me recently as I sat reflecting on how I nearly drove my mother off the road. That incident had occurred another night long ago. Irritated by a slow driver ahead of me, I tailgated the vehicle so closely that I could not even see the license plate. I persisted until the car turned off onto a side road.
But that side road was the very road that I intended to take to visit my parents—and the driver was my mother.
The shame that overcame me in that moment was so great that, to this day, whenever I find myself following a particularly slow driver, I think, That could be my mother. This simple thought summons up images of my mother, nervous and cringing, as other drivers recklessly bully her on the road. My mother may not be the best driver, but she does not deserve to be harassed. 4
Olga Murray
One night, she was invited into a hut, where she met three children whose father said they were lucky to get an education — even if they hiked two hours up and down a mountain to school. As she watched the children sitting on the dirt floor of their hut, doing their homework by candlelight, she had a revelation.
“I suddenly knew — out of the blue, in a lightning moment — what I wanted to do with the rest of my life,” she wrote. “Right then, I made a promise to myself that I would find a way to educate Nepali children.”
Ms. Murray dedicated her next 40 years to thousands of Nepali children. She began during her next visit in 1985, providing $1,200 in college scholarships to four orphaned boys.
Then, through the Nepal Youth Foundation, which she co-founded in 1989, she created a social safety net that included building nutritional centers to relieve starvation. She also rescued thousands of girls and young women who had been sold by their fathers, often poor subsistence farmers, into indentured servitude for wealthy Nepalese families. 5
Mesarvot—Israeli Pacifist Refuseniks
The protests had begun to include objection to Israeli authoritarianism, in particular against Palestinians in the occupied territories. Mitnick said his refusal to serve was about these very issues: “I do not want to take part in the continuation of the oppression and the continuation of the cycle of bloodshed, but to work directly for a solution.” 6
Elam’s views on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict were clarified by his activism, which had taken him to the occupied West Bank and brought him into contact with Palestinians, whom he befriended. His stances were hardened not only as he watched the Israeli military’s treatment of his new friends, but also in how the soldiers viewed him. “They treat me as a traitor. They laugh at my face when they see me with Palestinians,” he said. “I realized that this whole system is very corrupting.” 6
The expectation that everyone serves is so pervasive that few register that this makes them part of a system that oppresses Palestinians. “A lot of the Israelis that do not consider that is because they were born into Israeli society, a society that from kindergarten teaches us about previous wars, about Israeli nationalist heroes,” Elam said. “I would almost say I cannot blame the people who do join the army. But at the end of the day, us refusing is us attempting to bring this up into conversation to make more people do it.” 6
Another teenager in the network, Ben Arad, was sentenced to 20 days last month for refusing, and his sentence has since increased to a cumulative 50 days. “I oppose senseless killing, the policy of intentional starvation and sickness, and the sacrifice of soldiers, civilians, and hostages for a war that cannot and will not achieve its declared objectives and that could escalate into a regional war,” Arad said in April. “For these reasons and more, I refuse to enlist.”7
Footnotes
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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/19/nyregion/metropolitan-diary.html ↩
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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/28/nyregion/metropolitan-diary.html ↩
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https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sCWe5RRvSHQMccd2Q/i-would-have-shit-in-that-alley-too ↩
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https://www.lionsroar.com/that-driver-could-be-your-mother/ ↩
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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/12/world/asia/olga-murray-dead.html ↩
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https://theintercept.com/2024/01/08/israel-army-refusal-protest/ ↩ ↩2 ↩3
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https://theintercept.com/2024/05/09/israel-military-teenagers-ceasefire-mesarvot/ ↩