Remembering the humanity of helpers
Mr. Rogers' mother told him to "look for the helpers" in times of trouble. But are we really seeing them?
A few weeks ago, I wrote in this post about solidarity — about remembering that many of us, whether we live here in America or in the Middle East, are living in contested territory, as we struggle for safety, self-determination or both. Things overseas may seem far away, but we are all in this together.
This week, this notion was brought home to me when seven aid workers for World Central Kitchen, an org I’ve been supporting this month, were killed on their way to deliver aid to starving people in Gaza. The global staff of World Central Kitchen have reached out to say they are taking time to grieve, to honor their memories, and re-think their strategy in the region.1
These are their names and faces:
In solidarity, and in honor of these seven helpers, I wanted to offer a space to do the same. A place where we can grieve, and honor, these unique human beings.
I also wanted to offer a few thoughts below in solidarity with all who sacrifice their time and energy to respond to human suffering. About how we can not just “look for the helpers” in moments like this, but really see them.
By this I mean:
Seeing what helpers are like in their full humanity.
Understanding who is impacted and what is at stake for those who choose to take on difficult care work on behalf of the rest of us.
What happens when the helpers and those helped are alienated from one another
How we must all work towards better care for the ones who care for us.
Whether you are a self-identified helper yourself, or you love someone who is, I hope you’ll read on.
“If you look for the helpers, you’ll know that there’s hope”
The phrase “look for the helpers” comes from Fred Rogers — in my opinion, a truly enlightened being — who offered this memorable remark in an interview about times of trouble like the ones we are in:
“My mother used to say, a long time ago, whenever there would be any real catastrophe, in the movies or on the air, she would say, ‘Always look for the helpers. There will always be helpers. Just on the sidelines.’ That’s why I think that news programs [should] make a conscious effort of showing rescue teams, of showing medical people, anyplace that there’s a tragedy ... Because if you look for the helpers, you’ll know that there’s hope.”
I have never had to look far for the helpers. I have written here about my mother, who was a disability advocate for her entire career. I have written here about my father, who is a social worker like my mother, and has also long volunteered to support environmental causes in his free time, often in humble grunt-work ways. I am proud of them. I am proud also to have followed in their footsteps as a helper myself, who continues to uphold their values of inclusivity and ecological literacy in my work as an educator, writer and activist.
But there is a both/and here. I have many memories of not only my parents’ noble choices, and the hope they created for others, but also of their less-than-pleasant consequences. I remember my parents struggling to be present or patient with us at home because they’d been keeping it together for hours upon hours at work, without sufficient breaks, due to financial cutbacks that decimated the ranks of their already underpaid staff. I remember having to make Spaghetti-Os for my brother because one parent or the other was stuck at work with a client in crisis, or hadn’t had time to go to the grocery store. I remember that at one point, my mother told me she had to go and donate her blood plasma regularly following her divorce, because her salary wasn’t enough to cover the bills, even though she held a college degree and a leadership position.
These are not my only sad childhood stories. My therapists over the years (yes, therapists, plural) have heard about a million more. These stories are not unique to me, either. They are common in many families where one or both parents are helpers. These stories are also relatively mild in comparison with those of my peers who hold other marginalized identities, or whose parents worked for even less pay, even longer hours.
Most importantly: these stories are not inevitable. They’re not folksy anecdotes I trot out on occasions like this with a shrug and sigh, like, “Yep, what can you do? That’s just how life is for people who work these jobs!” It is not a foregone conclusion that people in the helping professions should be poor, overworked, and exhausted. It is not necessary for our collective thriving as a species that the children of teachers, nurses or social workers should be overlooked so that other people’s children can be seen. If anything, my research on nature would suggest that the opposite is true: that cooperation and reciprocity, not exploitation, lead to far better outcomes.
The imperiled nature of care workers, and their work itself, is the result of cultural selfishness on an unparalleled scale, selfishness that is then cloaked in the language of the compliment. Notice how often helpers are described as “angels” or “superheroes.” Angels do not have bodies. Superheroes do not have vulnerabilities. This is convenient for people who would like to shut down striking care workers who are agitating for better wages or safer working conditions. The powers that be will never oppose strikes or other collective action by saying that these helpers don’t deserve what they are asking for. They will side-step their hypocrisy entirely by projecting it outward, claiming that helpers who are attempting to remain safely and gainfully employed in their work are the ones who don’t really care about the people they serve. Otherwise, why would they be so obsessed with money?
These compliments serve the same function as compliments that praise women, without evidence, for being “natural multitaskers,” in order to get them to take on far more than their fair share of the mental load. The apparent intent is to praise, but the impact results in subordination and oppression.
If you have ever met a checked-out teacher or an unusually grumpy nurse, you might tell yourself that they are simply less intelligent or driven than you, or more weak or flawed in some ineffable way, or “they would have gotten out before they started hating the job.” That might be true. Some helpers, like people in every other profession, do suffer from a lack of motivation or even from mental illness. But most helping professionals I have met are as strong and brilliant or more so than the people I have met in the context of mingling with Ivy Leaguers or Silicon Valley tech tycoons. They have to be, because they have to find a way to keep swimming upstream against the current of the kyriarchy, protecting the most marginalized among us, instead of allowing that current to carry them gently along.
The truth is that sometimes, helpers enter their professions out of genuine passion, then find that the low wages and high demands of the work have essentially locked the door behind them. Teaching in a high-needs school does not earn your partner extra protection from the police who are unjustly profiling people of color in your neighborhood. But you may not be getting paid enough to be able to move from that neighborhood to escape said targeting. Being a nurse who spends far more time than the average human providing care to the sick does not mean there are more proportionally resources available for you when your own young child or elderly parent needs care. The fact that your hours are so long means you will likely have to arrange for even more wildly expensive hourly care for them than a typical 9-to-5 employee might. This state of affairs leaves too many brilliant helpers too broke to quit or re-train in another profession, and too burned out from swimming upstream to find a different way to shore.
Living in communities where there is a particularly fraught or frayed connection between the helpers and the helped can even be fatal for helpers. I am always dismayed at the loss of life in any police brutality scenario, but as a food industry alum and educator, I was especially devastated by the death of Philando Castile in 2014, who was the nutrition services supervisor at a Montessori magnet school. His dedication to feeding children, and even the presence of a child strapped in the backseat, did not keep him safe from the police who shot him. They had no sense of how he fit into the web of connections to which they too belonged. They thought he was someone else, someone more objectively “bad.” He died because they did not look closely enough.
“It shouldn’t have happened”
The story of the loss of these seven aid workers in Gaza follows similar contours. They are located within the same web, even if they seem far away from us.
The workers were driving in a convoy with aid supplies. Military personnel opened fire. Officials have claimed that this was an error. That the shooters mistook the aid workers for someone more objectively “bad.” (WCK has disputed this account.)
The Israeli military's chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, said "the strike was not carried out with the intention of harming WCK aid workers. It was a mistake that followed a misidentification — at night during a war in very complex conditions. It shouldn't have happened."
The Israeli military has also praised World Central Kitchen for bringing humanitarian aid to people in Gaza, as well as to Israel after the Oct. 7 attack in the country.
Perhaps the powers that be, as in Philando Castile’s case, hadn’t realized that their targets had in fact been feeding their children, too.
If they had looked more closely, they might have seen people like Zomi Francom, below. Not just heroic angels, but fragile human beings. Beings with bodies, and vulnerabilities. Beings with family and friends, who miss not just the services they provided but the wholeness of who they were.
“This is not a stand-alone incident”
The story of World Central Kitchen’s lost helpers, like my own, is not one be told with a shrug, like, “Yep! They put their lives on the line to help the starving in ways that others have been too scared or selfish to do. What did they expect? Reciprocity? Respect? Protection?”
A better question might be: Who taught us that helpers should not get to expect those things? Who benefits from us continuing to believe it?
Pres. Biden is on record as stating the obvious — that this is not the way the story should go.
In a rebuke to the Israeli government, Biden also said "this is not a stand-alone incident," noting the high aid worker casualties in the conflict. "Israel has not done enough to protect aid workers trying to deliver desperately needed help to civilians."
Here’s the thing: are any of us doing enough to protect the helpers?
The bodies of helpers everywhere are contested territory. They are not more precious or valuable than the thousands of innocent civilians who have already been lost in this conflict on both sides. But the bodies of helpers are where the consequences of our collective failure to face reality — that we are physical beings living in an interdependent world — are perhaps playing out most poignantly. We know this, or we should. This particular failure simply happens to be occurring on a human scale — seven precious lives — that we as statistics-addled, violence-desensitized viewers can actually comprehend.
The heroic narrative surrounding these seven lives, and the wrongness of these deaths, is what is causing people like Biden, and even myself, to feel moved to comment in clear-eyed ways about this conflict, where before we might have felt more cowed or confused by the “complexity” of the situation. Because killing helpers who are feeding the hungry, like killing children, is not complicated. This shouldn’t have happened.
The fight to ensure that all governments, including our own, do “enough” to protect the helpers, is far from settled.
We should absolutely condemn the actions of the people who killed these seven brave aid workers. But we must also be willing to look at the ways in which we are slowly killing the helpers all around us, in ways fast and slow, every time we fail to recognize their humanity, their limitations, their fragility, their needs. If we truly wish to honor these seven, not to mention the thousands more who have been lost, then we each have to find a way to take up small piece of their work and carry it forward. Not just those of us who already identify as helpers, who may already doing too much — but those of us who don’t see how we can help, yet. Who have gotten a little too used to just looking.
If we do not each do our personal version of enough, the less-than-pleasant consequences will keep coming. One day, we may even wake up in need ourselves, reaching desperately for a number to call for food, for shelter, for childcare, for a real village — and find that there are no more helpers left alive to answer our call.
Because this is a quickly-developing situation, and one in which misinformation is likely to spread quickly, I am intentionally not including more biographical information about these aid workers, or logistical information about this incident, at this time. I hope to add more as the dust clears and we learn more, potentially through an independent investigation as called for by WCK.