Commonplace Courage

Washington was blanketed in snow that day, three inches on the ground and more falling fast as I walked to the magazine office about noon. People were friendlier than usual on the street, bound together in celebration of a rare touch of winter beauty for this city.

An elderly woman on Eleventh Street was shoveling her small patch of sidewalk. "You're doing a great job," I told her, "but I'm afraid you'll have to do again."

"Oh, I've been out here about once every hour since early morning. I can't leave it when it gets over an inch. Gotta think of other people on a day like this. Don't want anybody falling down. Gotta think of the children."

I spent most of the afternoon thinking of the children. Most decided to forego the usual walk home for lunch and stayed in their schoolyards throwing snow at one another. Snow families with gravel eyes popped up in the corners of the playgrounds. It was a snow festival.

Then the incredible tragedy struck. We first heard the sirens up and down Fourteenth Street, just half a block away from the office, and the helicoptors overhead. We turned on radios and got the news of the plane that had rammed into the Fourteenth Street Bridge and plunged into the icy Potomac.

A derailed subway under the Smithsonian injured several people and killed three more just half an hour after the plane disaster. Rescue personnel and vehicles were at a premium, most having already been called to the Fourteenth Street Bridge scene.

Traffic was at a standstill in the air, on the ground, and under. Ambulances were seen desperately trying to get through to the injured, one rerouting itself over the White House's sidewalk. Phone calls around our community sought the whereabouts of community members who had left the office two hours before.

We watched the television, as I recall watching almost 20 years ago, over and over, the sequence of shots in Dallas that killed a president. Again and again we saw the rescue efforts: a woman hauled off the ice floe she clung to into a hovering helicopter, a spectator plunging into the icy water after a stewardess unable to grab hold of a dangling life-ring.

We rivet our attention to tragedy. Perhaps because it reminds us of the preciousness and fragility of life. And in moments like this, everyone bows to the reminder. For an evening the whole city was hushed, paralyzed by the weather and the weight of the tragedy.

I was awake well into the morning, unable to sleep, struck with a sense of eeriness about knowing that two miles away the Potomac had become a frozen tomb for more than 70 people still trapped in the submerged debris of Air Florida's flight 90. I relived my day, knowing that it is these two things that bind us together: the celebration and the tragedy, the sharing of one and the bearing of the other for one another.

In the days following we learned about those who had perished: a stewardess who had learned on Christmas Eve--just three weeks before--that she was pregnant with her first child, a 5-month-old boy who had just met his great-grandmother, and a married couple on their way to retirement. The "regular" joys and mysteries of life were suddenly disrupted, torn apart; and they melted into a sorrowful poignancy for those of us who could not ignore them.

That Wednesday had been a day for heroes, the papers reported. And there were many. But the one who has not left my mind is a man, known for several days simply as "the 50-year-old bald man." He would have been one of the survivors. But time after time he handed to others a life line that could have lifted him to safety. He saved four lives, sliding the rope around those who were injured, weak, and disoriented. When the helicopter came back one more time for him, he had drowned.

Courage. The word was used a lot in this city following the disaster. I was reminded of a Korean friend involved in the resistance in that country, who once said to a member of our community, "In our country courage is commonplace; in yours, what should be commonplace is called courage."

I thought of all those people throughout the world who live daily with tragedy of a magnitude similar to that we experienced one snowy day in Washington. El Salvador comes to mind. So does Poland.

I read a few days later of that last resistance at the Wujek mine. The Polish military rolled in the tanks to warn miners about the consequences of continuing their strike in protest of the imposition of martial law. Women and children gathered to sing religious anthems. Many cried. Some of the women lay down in front of the tanks and were swept away by blasts of water fired from a water cannon. Others hung rosaries on the barrels of the tanks. Courage.

In some places in the world it is second nature to know that every life must be defended. Here it is a profound lesson that we only occasionally get shocked into realizing.

As we walk through this Lent and beyond, can we not live our lives riveted on the needs of those who suffer? Can courage not become commonplace in this country too? Can we not join those who walk through every day knowing, "Gotta think of other people on a day like this."

Joyce Hollyday was associate editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.