This American Life - 126: Do-Gooders

Broadcast on: 09 Apr 1999

From W.B. E.C. Chicago in Public Radio International, it's this American life at my request. Start from the top. I needed a driver. I couldn't drive. The problem was I wanted to, you know, have my same life, my same nice little, you know, suburban, get in the car and drive everywhere life.

Bridget was going blind in mid-life with a kid. She had stuff to do. So she took out an ad in the paper and hired somebody to drive her around. A guy named Harry. Nice guy. First day he picks her up in a van, takes her to her daughter's school at the end of the school day. They wait in line with the other parents. And Harry jumped out and started, you know, with his whisk room. You know, opened up the van on, open up on both sides and, you know, whisk rooming and tidying it up. When Aaron's Harry would park in the handicap space, or if that wasn't available, he'd park on the grass to save Bridget a few steps. She asked him to take her to the grocery store. Anyway, so then we, we get out of the car. And always he'd been wanting to help me up by the elbows. And he wanted to help. He wanted, he wanted, and he says to me as we went into the grocery store, let me get the, the basket for you. Let me carry you. And I said, no, no, no, I'm, you know, I'm fine. Now, oh, he says, please go, let me, I'm here to, to be of service for you. And he kind of shadowed me, you know, throughout the grocery store. It was just kind of, you know, again, a lot of that, you know, like back. And then this awful feeling of that he's trying to help me.

What I think he really wanted was, you know, to, to help somebody out. When you do something for somebody else, it always seems so simple. You just want to help. But in fact, you're forming a relationship with that person. And it's just as complicated as any relationship you can have. And like any other relationship, if you're not attentive to what the other person actually wants, it's easy to wonder, which is why doing good for others is so difficult.

In certain religions, the question of how to do good is a kind of obsession. Among my people, you're Jews, it was traditionally a very big deal. In fact, one way to understand all Jewish law is as a set of instructions for doing good in the world. A set of instructions, I should say, so complicated, spanning so many centuries and thinkers that in the 12th century, a philosopher named Maimonides actually made a crib sheet summarizing it all by listing the eight different ways that a person can do good for others. He listed in order of preference, from least desirable to the most. The lowest level of doing for others is giving grudgingly, then it's giving less than you should, but giving it cheerfully, then giving after being asked, then giving before being asked. And it continues on up through the most meritorious way to give, which is telling way, enabling the person that you're helping to become self-sufficient, so they don't need the help anymore. Today on our program, stories of people trying to do good, and why they often fail, and why they occasionally succeed. Our program today in just two acts, act one, you can't go home again, the story of two people trying to restore a small town to its former splendor, and how the biggest obstacle turned out to be the people whose lives they wanted to improve, act two, humanitarians. A chat with writer Philip Garavich about his encounters with international do-gooders about Rwanda and Kosovo, about genocidal murderers, and about Rick and Casablanca. Stay with us. Heck one, you can't go home again. You drive through cotton fields to get here, down out Highway 61 through Southeast Missouri. The nearest big town is Sykeston, population 18,000, 20 minutes away. When you drive into Canalville, Missouri, there's a sign that says population 319, and then just beyond it, another sign, saying pavement ends. Then it's mostly gravel roads and trailer homes. The businesses on Main Street aren't just closed, but gone. Towardown decades ago, the movie theater, the restaurants, the grocery stores, people used to come here from all the surrounding towns. And when Kenny Wharton and his wife Jackie talk about what it was like in Canalville when they were kids, it's like they're describing a dream, town and an old black and white Hollywood film. This was the place on a Saturday. You know, you had a hard time finding a place to park if you had a car. We had everything in this little town and people would come to town to visit. The old men would be playing chairs up down the streets, and the women would be visiting, and kids would be playing, two o'clock in the morning would play.

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