Not a clue

There have been some incredible events over the last few weeks.  Actually there are incredible events all the time, but some events are more horrific than we can imagine.  Just in the last few weeks, there were the Boston Marathon bombings, there was the ghastly destruction of so much of the small Texas town of West, and then while we were all still reeling, there was the rescue of three young women and a child from an apparently ordinary house in an ordinary neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio.

There’s no need here to review what happened each time; we all know what and when and where and how, if not why.  But there is one thought I hope we all keep in our minds and at the front of our attention:  the people who ran to help.   The events in Boston were horrific but as the cameras showed the blasts, they showed so many folks who ran to help; some were injured themselves in the second blast.  In West, ten of those who ran to help died. 

In Cleveland, no one died, thank goodness, but David Von Drehle, in an article in the May 20 issue of Time Magazine, describes something extraordinary,  “…Cleveland also learned something about the unassuming dishwasher Charles Ramsey, who heard a cry for help and ran toward it.  He had no idea what he was going to find:  ‘Bro, not a clue,’ [Ramsey] told the TV cameras.  And yet he went.  This too was a revelation.” 

There could have been someone threatening someone with a gun or a bomb or whatever.  And Ramsey had no special training, no weapon, no thought of any kind except to put down the food from Macdonald’s he was eating and go to help.  Because Charles Ramsey heard and acted, lives have been changed.  In all these events and so many more, differences were made, lives were saved, because of ordinary people who didn’t have a clue what exactly was going on.