Get Out Your Brooms And Caring

From Nabih Bulos, a reporter in Beirut, published in the LA Times and other places.  He was near the blast and still can't account for two hours right after the blast, nor can he recognize the photos on his phone.  He woke up on the ground with an eye swollen shut and cuts on his arms.  I've picked out the hopeful part, the part that I think most Alaskans, masked or not, would do in an emergency:

"Nevertheless, a picture emerges of two things. One is that I was extremely lucky. The other — and this is a surprise for a card-carrying misanthrope like myself — is that people can be incredibly, almost irrationally kind in times of crisis.

One friend offered his car. Another drove my fiancee and me more than an hour outside Beirut to find a hospital that wasn’t inundated with casualties. A friend of my brother’s — whom I had never laid eyes on before — arranged for his neurosurgeon buddy to set up a CT scan appointment and eye examination, and chauffeured me from hospital to hotel to clinic. Everyone helped — no hesitation, no questions asked.

That generosity seems everywhere. In my neighborhood, roving bands of broomstick-toting volunteers walk around battered streets and apartments, sweeping away blood-soaked glass shards, pulverized furniture and the other detritus of lives shattered. Others grab tools, salvaging what materials they can to board up entrances and restore some semblance of normalcy for shell-shocked residents. Dozens of charitable groups and mutual aid organizations have reoriented themselves to dealing with the tragedy. All this is done in the almost complete absence of the state, whose carelessness appears to have caused the cataclysm in the first place."

Actually, we're in the middle of a slow motion emergency.  Let's get out those brooms and start sweeping away the epithets, the demands for trivial rights, and pick up our responsibilities to each other and to our democracy.