"A Greater Network of Kindness"

Have you ever experienced an unexpected convergence of apparently random related events? That happens to me from time to time, and it happened again last week.

I was reading a novel by one of my favorite authors, Ian McEwan. The book is Lessons, published in 2022. In truth, I bought it shortly after its release, got through the first 70 pages, and then stopped reading. I don’t remember why I put it down; maybe I found other books to read and just forgot about it for a while. In any event, a couple of weeks ago, I picked it up and decided to start again from the beginning. That’s actually a bit ironic, because the opening scene depicts the main character, Roland, who at that time was 11 years old, enduring a piano lesson and having to start from the beginning each time he makes the same mistake. (The lesson is more fraught than that description, but no need to go into it now.)

Like all of McEwan’s books I’ve read (Atonement, Saturday, On Chesil Beach, The Children Act, Solar) it is exquisitely written. Since I haven’t gotten very far yet, I don’t know what’s about to happen (no spoilers please), but I’ve read far enough to know that Roland, in his adult life, may have experienced a tragedy, the truth of which I expect will unfold in the pages that follow.

The passage that caught my attention emerges from the scene of an accident. Roland’s parents are taking him to boarding school somewhere north of London. They are riding on a bus when they see a man “flying” through the air, only to discover he had been dislodged from his motorcycle in a collision with a car. The man on the motorcycle and a woman in the car are badly injured. Roland’s father, a veteran of the Second World War, attends to the unconscious motorcyclist. Other men arrive and rush to the aid of the woman. Then two ambulances and a police car appear, and the wounded are taken to the hospital.

After depicting the scene, McEwan describes 11-year-old Roland’s reaction. Roland had never seen a medical emergency before. He begins crying, but as McEwan explains, his tears are not borne of sadness.

Roland was sorry for the man and the woman but that wasn’t it. His tears were for joy, for a sudden warmth of understanding that did not yet have these terms of definition: how loving and good people were, how kind the world was that had ambulances in it that came quickly out of nowhere whenever there was sorrow and pain. Always there, an entire system, just below the surface of everyday life, watchfully waiting, ready with all its knowledge and skill to come help, embedded within a greater network of kindness he had yet to discover. It seemed to him then, as the ambulances receded with their distant sirens sounding, that everything worked, and was decent and caring and just. . . . [H]e sensed he was at the beginning of a new life and now he understood that the world was sympathetic and fair. It would embrace and contain him kindly, justly and nothing bad, really bad, could happen to him or to anyone, or not for long.

As I said, I haven’t gotten very far into the book yet, but the story has already led me to suspect that Roland’s innocent, optimistic view of the world may be challenged. Yet the events this passage portrays, and the hopefulness that arises from them, comes strikingly close to the story I heard from the guest in the most recent episode of my podcast, Higher Callings.

That guest was Thomas Grilk. Tom, now retired, served for more than a decade as President and CEO of the Boston Athletic Association, the nonprofit organization that gives us the Boston Marathon. Tom occupied that role in 2013, the year two bombs exploded close to the finish line, killing three people instantly and seriously injuring many more.

Among other topics we covered in the podcast, I asked Tom about the events of that horrific day. He explained that, as terrible as the bombings were, they likely would have been much worse had it not been for the extensive emergency preparations undertaken by numerous federal, state, and local agencies, hospitals, and emergency medical teams, as well as the actions of several runners and passersby who were able to get to the injured before the trained emergency responders could reach them.

Here is a small snippet from the episode:

Tom: What happened when the bombs went off? It was horrible, of course. Three people died immediately, and hundreds of others were injured, many of them horribly. But just as a broad statistic, apart from the three people who we so tragically lost that day, everyone else survived. The 30 most seriously injured people were at a hospital operating room within 18 minutes. All of the most seriously injured people were at the hospital within 47 minutes because of the preparation work that they had all done. So as people were moved into the medical tent, they were immediately triaged, brought up to the other end of the medical tent where the ambulances were. With the race being pleasant and having very few medical problems, there were maybe 16 or 17 ambulances staged. When the bombs went off, that number went up to 73.

Don: And you had a number of hospitals who were actually ready in case they needed to treat people.

Tom: Because they had prepared in conjunction with everybody else. So that when the injured people got to the ambulance and to the medical tent, there were a couple of people there who were responsible for allocating them to the right hospital that could provide the treatment they needed and had not been overwhelmed by other injured people. It was as efficient as one can imagine. When I describe this at other marathons, people are slack-jawed at how well that went because of all the work that they did.

After this exchange, I asked Tom about the runners and passersby who also assisted the wounded. He explained that the bombs were exploded and the damage was inflicted on the sidewalk, outside the barriers that separated the runners and emergency responders from the public. The barriers slowed down the emergency teams who were sprinting to get to the injured spectators, but runners who had finished the race and others were not so impeded. Those volunteers bravely ran towards the areas where the bombs had exploded and, in some cases at least, were able to slow down or stop the injured people’s bleeding until EMTs could get to them.

Tom explained:

People inside of stores, the manager of Marathon Sports, Shane O'Hara, suddenly [had] to set up almost a field reception center inside the store. You had people finishing the race as the explosions took place and running back to help, some of whom we still see. Rob Wheeler, who was a guy who didn't know he was running until the night before, had never really had a good home, but felt a responsibility to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for having looked after him. He ran back. Colonel Everett Spain, a Purple Heart, Bronze Star recipient from the battlefield, Afghanistan, had just guided a blind runner across the finish line. He thought, "I got to do what soldiers do." He turned and ran back.

And there were a lot of those people who stepped in to do something, even as police were telling everybody quite sensibly, "Get out of here. Now. Go. We don't know what else could happen." Some people went back and did that. And if they hadn't, then the survival rate, in all probability, would have been much lower because it took a minute or two for people to just tear down those barricades.

In our fraught times, even as standards of civility fray, it’s good to be reminded of the fundamental decency of people who will put themselves in harm’s way to come to the aid of their fellow humans. In the case of the 2013 Boston Marathon, as in many other traumatic events, heroes acted without regard to gender, race, nationality, political loyalties, or any other identifiers. They were simply selfless and courageous people helping people who, in that moment, needed them.

Whether Ian McEwan meant to portray the fictional Roland as astutely perceptive or terribly naïve to recognize the “vast network of kindness” that would prevent anything “really bad” from happening, his vignette about the selfless first responders at the scene of a crash reflects something noble about the human character. That nobility reveals itself in real life not once in a blue moon, but consistently, time and again, just as it did at the Boston Marathon on a sunny April day. And while nothing can ever make up for the tragic losses those spectators and their families sustained, the dedication and bravery of all who responded to innocent victims in dire need should give us all true cause for hope.

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You can find my interview of Tom Grilk at the Podpage website, and on such platforms as Apple Podcasts and Spotify.