Trending
Eric Dingler-Brown
Jersey Shore
"When the future is bleak and uncertain, what do you believe in to keep going?"
That's what the hospital's missionary asked me when I was strapped to my hospital bed last year, when I was looking down the barrel of months and months of rehab to rebuild my broken legs.
My answer is still the same.
People.
"Just look around you. From top to bottom, every person in this hospital is here because we, as a species, wanted to be able to take care of each other. And while these folks have other concerns and objectives too, the fact remains from doctors, to nurses, to janitors, to therapists, to social workers, to cooks, to delivery folks, every single person in this whole building is contributing to the social consensus that taking care of each other is important. And I wouldn't still be here without them," I said.
The coming years are going to be hard for a lot of us. But I want us to remember something:
We care about each other. When we see people struggle or in danger (and not caricatures from talking heads on TV), we instinctively try to assist each other. When my car was totaled in 2022, I didn't call 911. I didn't send out medics and support. I didn't get my car off the road. People did -- people I did not know or ask to help.
It is important to us, on a level so deeply innate to the only way to describe it is "human," to take care of the people around us.
That said, the world has gotten so big we can't see everyone. So big we have to rely on other people to tell us what the folks who aren't close to us are like. So big that a very small number of people can steal from the common good, while telling us the problem is we're supporting too many people, too much dead weight, while entire towns of wealth go to a handful of people who will never know the pain of missing a rent payment.
The issue has never been the number of mouths to feed: humanity has taken care of people for as long as we have existed for the simple reason that we like to do so. We like to take care of people who need help.
The problem are the dragons who take more than they need, more than the entire world needs, while the people around them starve.
When the future is uncertain, when dragons demand their sacrifices, who will I believe in?
The answer hasn't changed.
Invest in your neighbors. Help people.
Just because you can.
I believe in us.