When crises of mind-numbing scale fall on us, we are told to remember the sacrifices made by men and women in special clothes with special gear whose job is to run to danger and get others away. We rightly give thanks to first responders because they represent the pinnacle of human-ness.
When the site is clear, the flames doused, the dead removed and the wounded moved to treatment, that’s when the second responders come forward. Their job is less dramatic, but equally draining, and often goes on a very long time.
The second responders are a special class of Fred Rogers’ “helpers.” They are not paid or accredited. Often they have no official title or mandate. They simply do what ought to be done.
They take the shell shocked office worker with no idea where to walk and guide them, step by step, from the rubble of the trade center. They put their boats on their trailers and drive until they reach newly-born Lake Orleans and seek out those who need rescuing. They sew masks for strangers.
Many, many times, they simply go to the kitchen and put on water, for coffee or tea or months of meals for hungry people who they have not yet met.
That’s what I did, after our flood. I wasn’t trying to be good or get in the paper. We had food. We had gas. We had an unflooded kitchen. And, because Monday is the traditional wash day, you cook red beans and rice. And, if things are tough, you open the door to whoever wants red beans and rice.
Our mayor, LaToya Cantrell, with whom I have sometimes hotly disagreed, gave one of the most direct and honest appeals for “social distancing” in a recent appearance: what we have to do now is hard for us. We are a hugging people. We are a how’s your mom’n’em people. A hey get a beer sure bring your friend people. This new thing is not in any way our thing.
And it’s not our species’ thing, even our phylum’s. From the time we were little mini-shrews or whatever, we’ve had basic ways of making things better. Here, come rub on me. Here, I’ll lick your fur. Hey, I found a dead thing; wanna eat it together?
Every instinct we have developed over the ages is exactly wrong right now. We can’t huddle up. We can’t rub noses and sniff butts. We must eat separately. We are all natural second responders, and we’re way out of our depth.
Tonight, people in our neighborhood took dinner on their porches and conversed together, though at a volume that would not be appropriate for a dining room. Other neighbors, on their properly-distanced evening strolls, would stop and chat from the middle of the street. It was pretty nice.
Things are going to get worse before better. I think everyone’s clear on that. And, as they do, we are going to be more and more frustrated at the prohibitions on our very natural impulse to move together, to huddle, to cuddle, to pat and say there there, to do all the things we’ve done since we were adorable mini-shrews and that have served us so well.
Our instincts are not really wrong, only our familiar way of expressing them. There are ways to hug from a distance. There are ways to break bread at separate tables. We will find them, all of them. Second responders aren’t shut out of this game by any means. We are, in fact, central to victory.
We will most certainly yield to our finest instincts in the coming difficulty, but we will do so in ways we have never done before, ways we could not have imagined.
We will learn, to our great joy, that “How’s your mom‘n’em” sounds just as sweet from the street as it does from the dining room.