LET YOUR GRASP EXCEED YOUR REACH

We can't save everybody, only the people we can reach. ​

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
We can't save everybody, only the people we can reach.   Robbie Schaefer
 
The story is his to tell, but here is the spoiler. When Robbie Schaefer’s father was a little boy in Europe, he and his family were saved from transport to a concentration camp by a stranger. They never learned her name.
 
Schaefer is a multiple-award-winning musician best known as part of Eddie from Ohio. When he starts to tell the story, you already know the end because there he is, telling it. And if you keep listening, you come to understand the profound challenge he presents through the example of his own pre-history and personal life.
 
I understand why people have fallen away from reading a newspaper each morning and watching a reputable news broadcast at night. The global reach of reporting and immediate access afforded by electronic devices creates a bombardment of mostly bad news. If you can find out about a tornado or a disease or a mass shooting with a glance or video clip, why affix yourself to a chair and allow so much more disturbing information to pour out at you?
 
But I think it is worth spending time with that discomfort. The very fact that there are so many different kinds of endangerment in this world ought not to be a manifesto for fear. Instead, view it as the menu from which you can choose to affect a rescue of your own.
 
If you have read more than a handful of these columns, then you know my politics and social justice inclinations. But you don’t have to be like me to discover any given evening an opportunity to be a hero. All of those catastrophes leave victims in their wake, some of them just like you and others not at all. Even more so, like the example of Mr. Schaefer’s rescuer, some of them can be removed from harm’s way before the title of victim is bestowed upon them.
 
I admit to crying easily at the evidence of the generous acts of others – not always at risk of their own security, but always unnecessary for it. The television networks have figured out that the palliative for the diet of tragedy and outrage they serve for twenty-six minutes comes with feel-good stories at the end. Sometimes it is an unlikely rescue from a collapsed building or the surprise donation of a kidney. And look, if you can do that, then more power to you.
 
But more often it is arranging for a returning service member’s reunion with family, or a neighborhood celebration of a kid’s triumph over cancer. Perhaps it is a ride to the maternity hospital or a kind word from or to the delivery person. You can rescue someone’s heart from grief and despair with a lasagna. How great is that?
 
I do not minimize the extraordinary courage that the anonymous stranger exhibited by rescuing the Schaefers from certain death. Thank God those needs are not proximate to most of us; I am not certain I have the inner strength to put myself at risk as the mystery person did. But if I admire her – and I do – then it behooves me to stretch out my arm and discover just whom I can reach. The town decimated by the tornado, the family shattered by a shooter, the community struggling to find clean water to survive, the refugees fleeing oppression and plopped into a strange city by elected officials – you can reach one of them. The neighbor visited by sudden illness, the kid whose single mom can’t afford a necessary tutor, the housebound person who misses their friends in church or synagogue or community center – you can reach one of them.
 
Your solitary act will not protect the planet or make our schools safe again. I know that every tradition, my own included, insists that if you save a life, you save a world. Don’t be grandiose in your intentions. There is a straight line from the round-up of Jews on that fateful day to an orphaned little girl with a guitar, and that’s enough to make your tiny drop of courage worthwhile.
 
You are here because you or someone before you were reachable. Stretch out that arm and see whom you can save.