"What I Found When I Looked For The Helpers" from The Atlantic

 From website The Atlantic:

Along with Cary, hundreds of first responders from around the country descended on New York in an extraordinary effort under the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The city’s hotels, emptied of tourists, became de facto dormitories for emergency workers. The Bronx Zoo parking lot became a village of trucks ready to shoot out and rescue the sick. Cary spent weeks doing “hospital decompression”—moving patients from too-full facilities to less-full ones. “You could tell he was tired,” Alissa Perry, a Colorado paramedic who deployed to New York with Cary, told me. But “he was never gonna go home until they told him to.” He was planning to extend his deployment when he got sick with COVID himself. He died in April, roughly a month after he first arrived in New York. Fire and EMS trucks lined the streets of two cities, New York and Aurora, with flashing lights and saluting people, to pay him tribute on his way home. Friends and neighbors held up signs: all gave some. some gave all.

I needed to read this to offset how I feel about the rise of the Anti-Vax, Anti-Rationality crowd - we need to remember that we "all gave some" and that some have or will give all, and that the altruistic, community-minded amongst us far outweigh the selfish.

Once this is all over, I'm going to remember, and continue to judge, those who complained about simple measures, such as wearing a mask, to protect their neighbours. But I also think we need a way to remember and celebrate the sacrifices of those who worked FOR the rest of us, something like ANZAC Day, but for the opposite of trying to kill other people.

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