It all begins with an idea.

It all begins with an idea.

“Everyone has just been through a hurricane, and they are all going to handle that differently.  We have to extend them that grace.”

Strangers both connected to the town and without any connection arrived on that fourth day to come to the aid of people in need. It did not matter these definitions we have constructed, both political and social that divide us so. And while the amenities we have become so accustomed to were down, the water, the power, and the cell service spotty, it was the loss of communication that revealed to us our relationship to our screens, so much so that it causes one to wonder at it. Because given a few days fasting from the algorithms that have been constructed to pit us against one another, given only a few days removed from such noise then those constructs soon fade and given a common obstacle to overcome then we come together again to work towards some good end with neighbors and with strangers regardless.

And so I direct him to the downtown and I thank him for his compassion, because I have to believe in that moment that we all are wired for compassion, and that we can be very passionate about that compassion. I certainly concede that the ways we express our compassion may be compromised by our biases, our actions may not align with our intentions, that our actions may in fact be simply ill-informed, but that at the core of it, in our deepest being, most of us feel compassion towards others, and so I acknowledge the compassion in this very quietly spoken, confusingly confronting person who is up from Georgia to “lend a hand”