A Word On Radical Care

This won’t be long.

For the last 24 hours, just like you, I have been seeing video and stills released from yesterday’s attack on the subway in Sunset Park, and like everyone else I have been feeling shock and terror and also trying to keep up with life, which did not stop or even slow down in the time since this event. It is easy and natural to become overwhelmed, but I am sending this brief letter to draw your attention to something else.

The conductor of the train that was attacked, whose name has not been mentioned in the press, saved what were doubtlessly many lives from danger when they gave instructions over the train’s intercom that led commuters out of the line of fire and to the safety of another train, and this person had no idea whether they themselves would escape the danger they were leading passengers from. That is actual, simple heroism.

The video and images that have been released, while extremely difficult to see, also reveal strangers tending to strangers wounds, while it was still unclear whether or not they were yet in a safe place. Ten people were shot, some unable to walk on their own, and many of those victims were tended to by people they didn’t know, who chose to put pressure on their wounds or lead them off the train to wait for emergency services, rather than more easily running away to find their own safety.

One of the things I love most about New York - a city that I find, throughout the rest of the country, Americans feel free to criticize freely as subhuman or too “mean” - is how much we care for each other. We see it in small ways every day and we see it in big ways, like the way we collectively came together after 9/11. We may not smile at you on the street, we may yell at you for walking too slow when you are touristing with your family, but if you need your femoral artery tied off on the subway floor at 8:30 am on a Tuesday… we got you. And in New York, that will never change. That is radical, loving care.

It is imperative, in this moment, that we find ways to radically care for each other. This means so many different things - sometimes it’s helping outwardly, sometimes it’s simply behaving conscientiously, sometimes it will be rewarding and sometimes it will be challenging and uncomfortable. But caring for each other - caring radically for each other - is a choice, and one that makes all the difference in the narration of our future together and the way it ultimately unfolds.

I know I haven’t sent one of these in a while - it’s been a wild few months over here. And I might hear from some that this is not about sustainability. But I would argue that sustainability, in the strictest term, means the ability to go on. This is about our ability to go on. Please take care of each other so that we can do so.

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