The Transformative Power of Doing What You Can
Folks, it’s rough out there. We’re not going to sugar coat it. That’s why we decided to take a break from the big stuff and spend some time finding the sparks of light in humanity while we wait for Olivia to obliterate us with a dissection of Ayn Rand.
Here’s a list of what we covered:
You may know Michael Ilitch Sr. as the founder of Little Caesers Pizza. But did you know he also founded an organization that has helped fight food insecurity for roughly 3.7 million people and paid Rosa Parks’ living expenses for 11 years?
The Bus Driver Who Saved Irena Sendler
Irena Sendler was known as the female equivalent of Oskar Schindler, a woman who risked her life to save over 2,500 children in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II. Her life story alone is a tale of unimaginable kindness and sacrifice, but the story we focused on was much smaller in scale. As summarized in the Tumblr post linked above and featured in the book Irena’s Children, one bus driver changed the course of history simply by doing what he could at a pivotal moment with the tools at his disposal.
During the German occupation of Czechoslovakia (1938-1945), 400,000 Czechoslovakia citizens endured forced labor, referred to as Totaleinsatz. In his book, The Fall of Fortresses, Elmer Bendiner recalls the moment he learned just how potent harm mitigation can be—especially when practiced in the most dire of circumstances.
The Ambiguous Kindness of Zoltán Kubinyi
Zoltán Kubinyi was an Adventist pastor conscripted into military service for the Nazis in 1944. Though he found himself the commander of a labor camp purely by accident, he used his power to shun violence and respect the prisoners’ autonomy in whatever ways he could without being removed from his position. Ultimately, when orders arrived to move the men under his purview to a concentration camp, Kubinyi refused and ultimately saved the lives of over 100 men at the cost of his own.
In June of 2019, a Trump official argued that detained children in border camps don’t need soap, toothbrushes, or beds to be ‘safe and sanitary.’ In a response to a tweet containing this quote, both Michael Scott Moore and David Rohde (American journalists who were held captive by Somali pirates and the Taliban respectively) responded that their captors—groups notorious in the US for their allegedly heinous-by-comparison behavior—had provided these basic necessities to them during their imprisonment. How can a country that purports to be a land of freedom and opportunity treat other humans this way? Probably because we rank so highly (read: poorly) on the Global Impunity Index.