In a Dust Storm of Altruism
Hollywood movies and too many government pandemic plans still presume that most of us are cowards or brutes, that we panic, trample each other, rampage, or freeze helplessly in moments of crisis and chaos. Most of us believe this, even though it is a slander against the species, an obliteration of what actually happens, and a crippling blow to our ability to prepare for disasters.
Hollywood likes this view because it paves the way for movies starring Will Smith and hordes of stampeding, screaming extras. Without stupid, helpless people to save, heroes become unnecessary. Or rather, without them, it turns out that we are all heroes, even if distinctly unstereotypical ones like that elderly woman who got Fichtel back on his feet. Governments like the grim view for a similar reason: it justifies their existence as repressive, controlling, hostile forces, rather than collaborators with brave and powerful citizenries.
Far more people could have died on September 11th if New Yorkers had not remained calm, had not helped each other out of the endangered buildings and the devastated area, had not reached out to pull people from the collapsing buildings and the dust cloud. The population of the towers was lower than usual that morning, because it was an election day and many were voting before heading to work; it seems emblematic that so many were spared because they were exercising their democratic powers. Others exercised their empathy and altruism. In the evacuation of the towers, John Abruzzo, a paraplegic accountant, was carried down 69 flights of stairs by his coworkers.
Here’s how John Guilfoy, a young man who’d been a college athlete, recalled the 9/11 moment:
“I remember looking back as I started running, and the thickest smoke was right where it was, you know, a few blocks away, and thinking that, like, whoever’s going to be in that is just going to die. There’s no way you could – you’re going to suffocate, and it was coming at us. I remember just running, people screaming. I was somewhat calm, and I was little bit faster than my colleagues, so I had to stop and slow up a little bit and wait for them to make sure we didn’t lose each other.”
Had he been in a disaster movie, he would have been struggling in some selfish, social-darwinist way to survive at others’ expense, or he would simply have panicked, as we are all supposed to do in disaster. In the reality of September 11th, in a moment of supreme danger, he slowed down out of solidarity.
Many New Yorkers that day committed similar feats of solidarity at great risk. In fact, in all the hundreds of oral histories I read and the many interviews I conducted to research my book, A Paradise Built in Hell, I could find no one saying he or she was abandoned or attacked in that great exodus. People were frightened and moving fast, but not in a panic. Careful research has led disaster sociologists to the discovery – one of their many counter-stereotypical conclusions – that panic is a vanishingly rare phenomenon in disasters, part of an elaborate mythology of our weakness.
A young man from Pakistan, Usman Farman, told of how he fell down and a Hasidic Jewish man stopped, looked at his pendant’s Arabic inscription and then, “with a deep Brooklyn accent he said ‘Brother if you don’t mind, there is a cloud of glass coming at us. Grab my hand, let’s get the hell out of here.’ He was the last person I would ever have thought to help me. If it weren’t for him I probably would have been engulfed in shattered glass and debris.” A blind newspaper vendor was walked to safety by two women, and a third escorted her to her home in the Bronx.
Errol Anderson, a recruiter with the fire department, was caught outside in that dust storm.
“For a couple of minutes I heard nothing. I thought I was either dead and was in another world, or I was the only one alive. I became nervous and panicky, not knowing what to do, because I couldn’t see… About four or five minutes later, while I was still trying to find my way around, I heard the voice of a young lady. She was crying and saying, ‘Please, Lord, don’t let me die. Don’t let me die.’ I was so happy to hear this lady’s voice. I said, ‘Keep talking, keep talking, I’m a firefighter, I’ll find you by the response of where you are.’ Eventually we met up with each other and basically we ran into each other’s arms without even knowing it.”
