I have witnessed something quite similar. During the flash-floods in 2021 in Germany, locals in the Ahr region absolutely rose to the occasion. Farmers were evacuating people in head-high water with their tractors during the night, local restaurants were already providing hot food and water the next morning wherever they could reach, pharmacies were loading whatever they had available on ATVs to somehow get much-needed medicine down precarious mudpaths. Local construction companies were already clearing rubble and building emergency bridges out of it. One Excavator was just basically standing in the middle of the river and ferrying people and rescue partys across. The local racetrack basically just organized everything while politicians were still playing the blame game. When our local firebrigade was officially pulled back from active duty because we lost one of ours during rescue operations in the first day, basically everyone just went down again and just tried to do whatever was possible. Absolutely stunning what people will do when they are face to face with disaster. I freely admit that I was crying like a little girl when I first saw the endless columns of Bundeswehr, THW, Fire Brigades, Farmers, basically everyone who could just streaming to help people they never met but were neighbors and friends for me.
Sorry for the rambling, but I am still not emotionally disconnected enough from it to concisely talk about it.
I think the biggest reason people in small towns may be a bit quicker to help is that people in cities are a little conditioned by the bystander effect to assume that people around them, or the authorities, are better equipped to help.
But any random individual asked for help in a city is likely to go well beyond their duty and be quite helpful.
Thank you for bringing this up, it was the parallel story that first popped into my mind as well, as this was a national tragedy of rare proportions.
To me the amount of people streaming from everywhere in the entire country (!) to help fix up a region that has been struck with disaster moved me to tears more than once now.
And the happier I am about this circumstance, the angrier I get at politicians and some media.
Indeed. Any cursory observation of human behaviour will disprove the Thatcherian maxim that people only ever do anything for their own selfish interest.
> And the most unusual thing about all this is: None of this is unusual. At least not within the national tapestry that is The Great American Small Town.
It also isn't unusual in the cities. Humans are wonderful and terrible everywhere. It reminds me of the 30 Rock episode where Jack and Liz go to Georgia to find a new comedian in touch with the "real America" and Liz keeps insisting that all Americans are real Americans and there is no "real America."
The acts of people after 9/11 in NYC remind us of the good in humans just as this small town inspires us.
As Mr Rogers said, "When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping."
When I lived in Chicago I saw the aftermath of a car/moped accident up close. I had just gotten off the L at Western and was walking to the north exit. To my right was a moped turning left under the tracks and to my left was a sedan driving out of an alley, also turning under the tracks.
I heard a crunch and a group of people at the exit all jumped and rushed over. I hadn't seen the actual accident, but feared the worst. Once I was street level the group that had rushed over had already called 911, was comforting the person on the moped (they were fine, at most concussed), and directing traffic around the accident. I ended up leaving because there wasn't anything to do and didn't want to get in the way.
60 seconds was all it took for a group of strangers to provide an overwhelming amount of help.
Walking home, I heard the siren of the ambulance, but that eventually faded as I walked another block or so, the scene of the accident swallowed by the vastness of the city.
I probably walked past a couple hundred people or so that evening, all of them unaware of what had happened under Western, yet filled with the hope all of them could provide an overwhelming amount of help.
Although I agree with it I think that small towns have something that is lost in big cities which is the sense of community, and that is simply because in towns you know every single person that has some impact in your daily live.
My family is from a small town who moved to the city right before I was born and there is something my mom said to me when I was a kid that got stuck in my mind which is the awareness of death, in big cities is like people don't die because you don't know about it. Although it may sound macabre I think that knowing about death helps me better understand being alive.
I'm old enough to have experienced the slow, quiet, patient love of Mr Rogers first hand; I'm not sure it's able to rise above today's noisy fears? I hope I'm wrong.
30 Rock also spoofed the "Subway Hero". A real story of a person falling on the tracks from a seizure and bystander jumped down and pressed them both into the track well while a train ran over them. There's alway bystanders and I'm sure the dynamics of a small town are different. Especially when a rush hour subway platform might have more people than Mendon.
I agree. One of the things that was visible to me as a transplant to Houston was how much city pride there was in how people came together after Harvey, even years after.
yes it is. last week i saw a homeless man follow a woman onto a packed train, scream in her face and throw her across the train, and nobody did anything. i’ll let you guess the races of the victim and the attacker. this was on the L in union square. no one cares. this country has been dying for decades and it’s almost completely dead
For some reason this reminded me of the Ray Bradbury story, "The Town Where Noone Got Off" which is a dark little story indeed about two men and a small town on a railroad line. This one is a bit more positive.
However, it turns out this whole incident was apparently due to the lack of a railroad crossing guard system of any kind at the intersection. The most basic system has flashing lights warning of oncoming trains, and even that wasn't present.
You must not drive out in the country often. Railroad crossing with lights are not common outside busy roads. The most you'll have is a railroad crossing sign. Certainly a flashing light system is safer, but you (and that news article) make it sound like it's absence is unusual.
I can find you a dozen such crossings within an hour of my house. If you care to head into the properly rural part of any state, you'll find they're everywhere. There ought to be flashing lights and arms at every one, but no one wants to foot that bill.
Was the truck actively crossing the tracks when it got hit or was it disabled? I haven't found any explanation of why it was there.
Interestingly, it's the line operator that usually has to establish and maintain those according to federal and (whatever) state guidelines might exist.
In a similar spirit of small towns rising to the occasion, I’ll take this opportunity to recommend the musical Come From Away (Apple TV), about the planes grounded in Gander, Newfoundland on 9/11. A wonderfully told story.
Nobody said anything about it in 40 years. There's a lot more nuance to small town people pulling together than the train wreck shows.
I grew up outside of Kirksville MO. I've even taken the Southwest Chief from La Plata one or two stops NE of Mendon, to Newton KS. Idealizing small town or rural life is a mistake. The issue is more complicated than "rural Americans pull together, urban Americans do not".
Having lived in both areas, cities make people crazy. Everyone spends so much time trying to stand out. Look at my fashionable clothing. Look at my exotic sexual identity. Nobody is comfortable in their own skin. There are no consequences to bad behavior because people are disposable and reputation is unimportant when there are 10million other suckers that don’t know you’re a dirtbag.
I don’t think we’ve evolved to live among millions of people.
Wow, strange to read of other folks from the Kirksville vicinity. I didn’t grow up there but spent my first seven years of adulthood nearby, and rode the Southwest Chief that’s being discussed in the article dozens of times.
Rural folks have lots of positive things going on. But they’re also mostly shrinking towns, and I’ve had teenagers try to run me (on my bike, they in cars) off the road for fun on a Saturday night.
I wouldn’t want to be a teenager in rural America. But there are some nice things about being a kid and an adult.
Communities aligned to a single goal can do amazing things, the downside is just that sometimes that single goal is “protect a murderer that we all like” or “commit genocide”.
And ironically one of the most popular ways to “do” the Katy trail is to take the Amtrak to Kansas City since that train has bike stowage, and riding the trail from west to east is (generally) all downhill.
Rode the entire trail in 3 days in 2016! Quite the challenge for myself at the time and living out of your bike was a blast. Got to talk and meet many locals and go into many small towns to resupply food and enjoy the ride. My total milage ended up being 270 miles.
It may not have made national news, but here (I only live a couple hours from Mendon) some of this made its way into local awareness. It was mostly focused on the efforts of the boy scouts in the area, though.
The Scouts who responded to this incident were passengers on the train that derailed. They were returning from Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. It is traditional for Scouts to take the trip to and from Philmont on a train.
There is an excellent book on this theme, which I have been recommending liberally for several years: "A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster".
It tends heavily to revisit certain themes, but overall it drives home the point that regardless of the social acrimony and political polarization that dominate social media and seem to divide Americans into inexorably inimical tribes, when it comes to everyday interactions, most Americans seem to be pretty decent and kind people.
There is a book about how people come together during times of disaster, called A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit. One of the distinct things I got from it is how the media often focuses on the gruesome details rather than how people more often than not help one another out. It is an eye-opening read that gave me a lot of hope and inspiration.
From the Publisher:
"The most startling thing about disasters, according to award-winning author Rebecca Solnit, is not merely that so many people rise to the occasion, but that they do so with joy. That joy reveals an ordinarily unmet yearning for community, purposefulness, and meaningful work that disaster often provides. A Paradise Built in Hell is an investigation of the moments of altruism, resourcefulness, and generosity that arise amid disaster’s grief and disruption and considers their implications for everyday life. It points to a new vision of what society could become-one that is less authoritarian and fearful, more collaborative and local."
Great to hear these people helping out. I didn't like when people started using the phrase "First responder" for police, fire, ambulance people. If you are at the scene of a problem, you can be a first responder and be there sooner than the "first responders". You can be a zeroth responder.
You can be. But you can also cause more harm than good as the zeroth responder (removing an impaled object, moving someone with a back injury).
Fortunately, there are affordable high-quality first responder courses. In the extreme, becoming a certified EMT takes only 100-200 hours of instruction, and there are many training options that are much shorter and cam be completed over a weekend.
>"This is a crisis for our democracy and our society," said Penelope Muse Abernathy, a visiting professor at Medill and primary author of the report, in a statement.
Why is everything a crisis now? The crying of wolf gets tiresome and it makes it easy to tune out, probably to the detriment of local newspapers.
Tangent but I have observed in the US that often the red lights at the train crossing start very late and give less than a minute for a vehicle to stop.
[+] [-] exar0815|3 years ago|reply
Sorry for the rambling, but I am still not emotionally disconnected enough from it to concisely talk about it.
[+] [-] mlyle|3 years ago|reply
I think the biggest reason people in small towns may be a bit quicker to help is that people in cities are a little conditioned by the bystander effect to assume that people around them, or the authorities, are better equipped to help.
But any random individual asked for help in a city is likely to go well beyond their duty and be quite helpful.
[+] [-] neuronic|3 years ago|reply
To me the amount of people streaming from everywhere in the entire country (!) to help fix up a region that has been struck with disaster moved me to tears more than once now.
And the happier I am about this circumstance, the angrier I get at politicians and some media.
[+] [-] andrepd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryan_j_naughton|3 years ago|reply
It also isn't unusual in the cities. Humans are wonderful and terrible everywhere. It reminds me of the 30 Rock episode where Jack and Liz go to Georgia to find a new comedian in touch with the "real America" and Liz keeps insisting that all Americans are real Americans and there is no "real America."
The acts of people after 9/11 in NYC remind us of the good in humans just as this small town inspires us.
As Mr Rogers said, "When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping."
[+] [-] kiernanmcgowan|3 years ago|reply
I heard a crunch and a group of people at the exit all jumped and rushed over. I hadn't seen the actual accident, but feared the worst. Once I was street level the group that had rushed over had already called 911, was comforting the person on the moped (they were fine, at most concussed), and directing traffic around the accident. I ended up leaving because there wasn't anything to do and didn't want to get in the way.
60 seconds was all it took for a group of strangers to provide an overwhelming amount of help.
Walking home, I heard the siren of the ambulance, but that eventually faded as I walked another block or so, the scene of the accident swallowed by the vastness of the city.
I probably walked past a couple hundred people or so that evening, all of them unaware of what had happened under Western, yet filled with the hope all of them could provide an overwhelming amount of help.
[+] [-] melenaboija|3 years ago|reply
My family is from a small town who moved to the city right before I was born and there is something my mom said to me when I was a kid that got stuck in my mind which is the awareness of death, in big cities is like people don't die because you don't know about it. Although it may sound macabre I think that knowing about death helps me better understand being alive.
[+] [-] skeeter2020|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tootie|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickysielicki|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] turdit|3 years ago|reply
yes it is. last week i saw a homeless man follow a woman onto a packed train, scream in her face and throw her across the train, and nobody did anything. i’ll let you guess the races of the victim and the attacker. this was on the L in union square. no one cares. this country has been dying for decades and it’s almost completely dead
[+] [-] photochemsyn|3 years ago|reply
However, it turns out this whole incident was apparently due to the lack of a railroad crossing guard system of any kind at the intersection. The most basic system has flashing lights warning of oncoming trains, and even that wasn't present.
https://www.kwch.com/2022/06/30/amtrak-derailment-places-spo...
In that respect it's also a story about the poor state of American infrastructure.
[+] [-] rustymonday|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msrenee|3 years ago|reply
Was the truck actively crossing the tracks when it got hit or was it disabled? I haven't found any explanation of why it was there.
[+] [-] kodah|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justusthane|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mttjj|3 years ago|reply
(Also, if the live production is touring near you- go see it. I saw it live a few years ago and it was awesome!)
[+] [-] alasdair_|3 years ago|reply
Americans are also especially bad at tackling problems that require a small, consistent, amount of help over a long period of time.
I’m honestly not sure why this is.
[+] [-] bediger4000|3 years ago|reply
Nobody said anything about it in 40 years. There's a lot more nuance to small town people pulling together than the train wreck shows.
I grew up outside of Kirksville MO. I've even taken the Southwest Chief from La Plata one or two stops NE of Mendon, to Newton KS. Idealizing small town or rural life is a mistake. The issue is more complicated than "rural Americans pull together, urban Americans do not".
[+] [-] soared|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] halffaday|3 years ago|reply
I don’t think we’ve evolved to live among millions of people.
[+] [-] mercutio2|3 years ago|reply
Rural folks have lots of positive things going on. But they’re also mostly shrinking towns, and I’ve had teenagers try to run me (on my bike, they in cars) off the road for fun on a Saturday night.
I wouldn’t want to be a teenager in rural America. But there are some nice things about being a kid and an adult.
[+] [-] eitland|3 years ago|reply
Seriously.
What kind of century are those people from?
[+] [-] RC_ITR|3 years ago|reply
Communities aligned to a single goal can do amazing things, the downside is just that sometimes that single goal is “protect a murderer that we all like” or “commit genocide”.
[+] [-] fortran77|3 years ago|reply
https://mostateparks.com/park/katy-trail-state-park
It's a 240 mile protected bike path.
[+] [-] PrairieFire|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] psmith50|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tnorthcutt|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freediver|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moomoo11|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ethbr0|3 years ago|reply
KSHB - https://www.kshb.com/news/local-news/mendon-missouri-communi...
KCUR - https://www.kcur.org/news/2022-06-28/amtrak-derailment-mendo...
[+] [-] chronotis|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tigeba|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marssaxman|3 years ago|reply
https://www.amazon.com/Paradise-Built-Hell-Extraordinary-Com...
[+] [-] buchoo|3 years ago|reply
It tends heavily to revisit certain themes, but overall it drives home the point that regardless of the social acrimony and political polarization that dominate social media and seem to divide Americans into inexorably inimical tribes, when it comes to everyday interactions, most Americans seem to be pretty decent and kind people.
[+] [-] fritztastic|3 years ago|reply
From the Publisher:
"The most startling thing about disasters, according to award-winning author Rebecca Solnit, is not merely that so many people rise to the occasion, but that they do so with joy. That joy reveals an ordinarily unmet yearning for community, purposefulness, and meaningful work that disaster often provides. A Paradise Built in Hell is an investigation of the moments of altruism, resourcefulness, and generosity that arise amid disaster’s grief and disruption and considers their implications for everyday life. It points to a new vision of what society could become-one that is less authoritarian and fearful, more collaborative and local."
<https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/301070/a-paradise-b...>
[+] [-] njarboe|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InefficientRed|3 years ago|reply
You can be. But you can also cause more harm than good as the zeroth responder (removing an impaled object, moving someone with a back injury).
Fortunately, there are affordable high-quality first responder courses. In the extreme, becoming a certified EMT takes only 100-200 hours of instruction, and there are many training options that are much shorter and cam be completed over a weekend.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jordanmorgan10|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Clubber|3 years ago|reply
Why is everything a crisis now? The crying of wolf gets tiresome and it makes it easy to tune out, probably to the detriment of local newspapers.
Oops, replied to the wrong article.
[+] [-] 999900000999|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ketanmaheshwari|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RickJWagner|3 years ago|reply
The day of the train wreck will live on in Mendon for generations, I'm sure. There will be kids and grand-kids telling this story in 50 years.