On the Kindness of Strangers in America

by Norman Berdichevsky (March 2018)

Fisk Tire Ad for Saturday Evening Post, Norman Rockwell, 1917

 

 

he most recent incident of mindless violence in which a disturbed 19-year-old gunned down 17 fellow students in a high school he had previously attended produced another veritable rash of doomsday hand-wringing about what can be done to prevent such events in the future and, even more depressingly, whether anything at all can be done to change what appears to be a trajectory of violence embedded in American history and mass culture. Such ruminations are often predicated on the initial understanding that somehow Anglo-American culture, as it took shape in the new world frontier society of North America, has simply contracted an inherited and incurable disease.

 

I teach at a private language school in Orlando, Florida which attracts several hundred new students each semester primarily from Latin America—notably Brazil, Venezuela and Colombia. The great majority of these students have expressed to me their high regard for American society which they have found to be a hope for starting new lives here as the only long-term solution to their own aspirations to lead secure and prosperous lives free from political turmoil and the violence of a huge criminal underclass many of them believe is pampered by their respective governments and left-leaning ideologies over the past hundred years.

 

A month ago, I had an interesting experience on my way home from work that I shared with the class, not out of any expectation that they would seize upon it as an example of precisely what they had meant in our discussion and had tried to explain in class.

 

There are so many stereotypes about Americans and all their problems and their characters usually portrayed on television documentaries or soap operas or sitcoms as selfish, egotistical and only concerned about money.

 

While I was standing next to my damaged car waiting for roadside assistance to arrive, three different men stopped their cars and asked if they could help me change the damaged the tire and replace it (without any thought or hint of expecting compensation). These three voluntary offers were spread out at approximately intervals of fifteen minutes each by drivers who had pulled into the plaza to do some shopping and spotted me and my damaged vehicle with an obvious flat tire and damage right side.

 

 

When I finished telling the story to my class, the immediate reaction was the incredulity of such an event in their respective homelands. Several Brazilians in the class only drive armored vehicles in order to avoid the possibility of robbery or kidnapping. They could not fathom why such total strangers would offer their help including the black men, given their understanding of racial tensions in the United States.

 

 

_________________________________
The Left is Seldom Right and Modern Hebrew: The Past and Future of a Revitalized Language.

Help support New English Review.

More by Norman Berdichevsky here.

Click here to see all Norman Berdichevsky’s blog posts on The Iconoclast.