Connections: Giving Tuesday

What sort of person willingly goes into harm’s way to help others? What makes a doctor or nurse fly to West Africa to do what they can in the Ebola crisis? What drives a journalist like the late James Foley, who was beheaded, into the heart of darkness to unveil things the world should know? How does a female reporter in the Middle East find the courage of her convictions? What balance of ideals and personal interest makes some folks willing to tempt fate for what they would call the greater good?

If there were simple answers to these questions, it might help the rest of us mere mortals better understand and appreciate them. But I don’t think there are any simple answers. 

Some people, like the staff of Doctors Without Borders or other humanitarian organizations, spend their adult lives — perhaps even the best years of their lives — in noble pursuits. Veterans Day this week was the occasion for media accounts of the untold number of men and women who sacrificed for others in the name of country, duty, or honor.

Those of us who count our blessings from the safety of our own livingroom hearthside chalk up our own good fortune to — what? Luck? Chance? Fate? The will of God?

I certainly consider myself one of the lucky: I have never known war, and what I know about the Holocaust did not come from personal experience. I haven’t faced serious illness, mercifully, and have no immediate friends or family in the armed forces. But the average American’s good fortune has come to feel like more than luck.

We accept as the natural order of things that we should be exempt from plagues like Ebola or the horrific behaviors that mankind is capable of. We expect to live in peace and plenty, expect to find enough food on the table. Although it may be irrational, we don’t expect a natural disaster (flood, famine, hurricane) to come our way.

The elementary school I graduated from in Bayonne, N.J., was named for Horace Mann, the writer, political leader, and educational philosopher whose impact on American schools remains so strong that it is hard to believe he was born in 1796 and died in 1859. 

In a speech as president of Antioch College in the last year of his life, Mr. Mann said, “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” There are those among us whom Horace Mann would count as having met that challenge. Would you call them the righteous? On our own doorstep, the volunteers in the ambulance and fire services deserve admiration. And by contrast, naturally, I’ve often thought, What about me?

We weren’t all born to be heroes. But in the annual mad-consumerism stretch between Veterans Day and the December holidays, I have a suggestion for those readers, like me, who would at least like to do a drop of armchair good: Google something called GivingTuesday.org, where you will be encouraged to give the actual heroes, either abroad or at home, a bit of humble support.