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“Hey…” she said, “go give that guy a water bottle.”
The homeless man she was nodding toward was sitting on a bench with an overstuffed shopping cart.
“Man,” I chided myself as I made my way toward him with my water in tow, “I didn’t even see this guy. She’s better at this than I am!”
Later, I smiled as she beckoned a waitress in a conspiratorial tone. ?See that older couple at the table on the other side of the dining room?” she asked, “Do you think you can put their meal on our bill, please? Don’t tell them though, it might be seen as a bit creepy.”
The couple, previously invisible to me, was sharing a small meal and positively glowed as the waitress removed their bill.
She’s much better at this than me!
Using her Facebook account, my wife gathered donations of soap, shampoo, lotions, and other toiletry items to place in bags to distribute with the water bottles. As we sat at the table at home, she commented “I read your blog…I had no idea you talked about me so much.”
“Of course,” I affirmed, “All of my best ideas came from you.” In fact, it would be helpful if you would choose a name so I can stop referring to you constantly as “My Wife” when I write.
She thought for a second. She bounced around names of muses, mythological deities, and a few Shakespearean characters. Finally, she decided.
“Watson!” she exclaimed proudly. Soon, she had determined her logo. The silhouette of a Victorian gentleman with a bowler making an “At-Your-Service” bow. It was humble, and emphasized her service orientation.
While stuffing the bags, she thought of the Rook labels that I place on the water bottles.
“Perhaps we should label these bags with both of our logos.” She mused.
She had indeed done most of the work with these.
“True. However, many RLSHs, when they combine forces, often form a kind of team, with a new logo.”
“Yes, but just two of us, we hardly constitute a ‘team,’ and I really don’t want to form a team with a bunch of people I don’t know.” She confessed.
A new voice joined the conversation. Our daugther’s fiancee’, who sidled up to the table and began stuffing bags noted “I’ve already chosen my name…Sage.”
“Nice!” I nodded, “It’s a plant indigenous to this area, it is often used for cleansing, and has a double-meaning for wisdom.”
My daughter wasn’t too far behind. “My name’s always been ‘Ember.’ I’ll use that one.”
I grinned over at my wife and she nodded.
It looks like we have a team now.
Soon, our new RLSH group had chosen a name (Desert Sage), adopted a logo (a simple line drawing of a sage leaf) and made plans to create a Facebook page to generate awareness, contributions, and support. Alas, “Desert Sage” was taken in Facebook, so we had to create it under a different name. The RLSH team Desert Sage, consisting of Watson, Ember, Sage, and myself can be contacted at the “Arid Sage” Facebook page at:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Desert-Sage/226532500791094
Rook

Sometimes I wonder if there’s an RLSH alive that doesn’t know the Kitty Genovese story by heart.  When I taught Social Psychology, this story was a centerpiece in my group behavior component, as was my own “Genovese Experience.”
Phoenix, Arizona has a tradition, it seems in welcoming new residents to its warm embrace.  It seems that everyone I know who has moved here found themselves in an auto collision within a few months of setting down roots.  Perhaps it’s a form of initiation, but my family and I were no exception.
My wife was driving our smallish Toyota Corolla though an intersection when a Bronco pulled out of a gas station on the corner and stopped directly in front of us.  She slammed on her brakes and cranked her steering wheel, but we didn’t stop in nearly enough time.   When a Corolla collides with a Bronco, it’s easy to determine the winner.  Our poor car became a large metal accordion with screaming children in the back seat.  Ever choleric, my wife immediately leapt from her side of the car to confront the other driver.
The children were screaming and, twisting about, I saw that they were each bleeding from the area of their eyes.  I tried the door on my side of the car, but it wouldn’t open.  I called out to my wife.
“Honey!  Call 911”
She kept screaming at the other driver instead.
“Honey!  The kids are bleeding from the eyes!  Call 911 now!”
My wife, ever relentless, began to scream at the other driver about how our children are now bleeding from the eyes.
It was then that I realized that we had drawn a crowd.  Accidents almost always draw quite a bit of attention.  This one was no exception.  There were approximately 10 or 12 people standing near the intersection, staring with intense interest and doing nothing to help.

***

It’s not that people don’t want to help,  I told my class, it’s just that the situation dictates that they do nothing!
People most often determine their behavior in groups by a few basic rules:  Social referencing, efficacy, and diffusion of responsibility. I remembered saying, Let’s take a look at a few of these.
I started writing up on the board…

• Diffusion of Responsibility:  People generally want to help.  They really do.  However, they don’t want to step on one another’s toes in the process.  If someone else is going to do it, who am I to get in the way?
• Efficacy: People like to feel competent.  Often, they won’t help if they don’t know what to do to help or if they feel that it’s not in their competence to do so.
• Social Referencing:  Probably the cornerstone of conformity, we tend to do what others around us are doing.  In doing so, we learn what behavior is appropriate in which situation.

The bad news, folks, is that when Kitty was being stabbed, each person was thinking that the next person would do something, everyone silently watched—which established a norm via social referencing, and no one seemed to feel as if they could safely intervene.  One person who did consider calling the police felt that she would get in trouble, as she was an undocumented immigrant.
The good news is that this can be remedied.  All that needs to be done is for someone in the observing crowd to be assigned the responsibility of some simple, helpful task that should be well within his or her competency.  As soon as he or she does this, in theory, social referencing dictates that others will follow suit and help on their own.

***

I looked back out at the crowd of bystanders.  Ignoring my wife, I pointed at the most salient person in the group.
“You!”  I shouted.  “Call 911!”
The young man’s glazed stare changed quickly as he blinked away his socially induced apathy.  A light seemed to come on in his eyes and he nodded quickly and sprinted off.
I never saw him again.
I set my sights on another person.
“You!” I pointed at a young woman in the crowd. “Do you have a cell phone?”
She nodded, already digging in her purse.
“Please! Call 911 now!”
She nodded again and began dialing.  Everyone else fell into roles like well-placed pieces in a puzzle.  One man ran into the gas station and bought water bottles for my children and a young lady used handkerchiefs and bottled water to wash the blood from my children’s faces to reveal very small cuts above their eyes.
One thoughtful gentleman suggested that I climb out of the car on my wife’s side.  I felt a little silly then.
Soon, the ambulances arrived and my children were in much more calm spirits thanks to the aid of the not-quite-apathetic bystanders.
Bystander apathy is indeed endemic to the human condition.  However, it can be countered with some very simple techniques.
-Rook
 

I flopped bonelessly across the bed and stared, unfocusing, at the ceiling.  I slowly closed my eyes against the harsh light of my thoughts.
I felt my wife’s weight on the bed as she sat down next to where I was laying.  Her voice floated toward me:
“What’s wrong?”
“Oh…I’ve failed.” I grumbled in what I hoped was a matter-of-fact tone.
“What do you mean?  Failed at what?”
Our daughter was visiting a friend’s house that evening, and it was arranged that I would pick her up.  As I turned onto one of the less savory streets of our city, my daughter pointed out a man sleeping on a bench at the bus stop.  “How sad…” She commented.
“And I just drove on.”  I groaned.  “I didn’t stop or anything.  My daughter watched me as I passed by someone who was apparently in need.”
I felt my wife’s hand brush across the top of my head.
“Why didn’t you?”
“I’ve got a thousand excuses.  All cop-outs.  I didn’t have anything to give to him. I couldn’t get to where he was without crossing several lanes of traffic, then parking at a grocery store, then walking over to the bus stop while leaving our kid in the car.  In that neighborhood.”
My wife’s hand stopped. “What else?”
She had accurately sensed that those were all just excuses I created after the fact. After I had failed to stop and give help, I came up with all sorts of ideas as to why I didn’t.
I sighed.  “I didn’t think of it until I was about three blocks down the road.  I wasn’t thinking much about helping others, I was just “being Dad,” concentrating on getting my kid home. I suppose I could have turned back, but then all those excuses came to mind and I just kept going.”
She resumed her hair-stroking.  “Your reasons don’t sound too much like cop-outs to me, but I think you may be feeling guilty because, for a moment, you’ve forgotten who you are.”
We sat in silence for a few heavy moments, then her voice reached my ears again.
“Why don’t you try this…”
Now, in the front seat of my car and within easy reach lies a small duffel bag.  It is always stocked with water bottles, each bearing the Rook symbol.  They not only serve as a constant reminder of who I am as well as my mission, they provide ready access to something everyone who lives in my neck of the desert needs.  It’s an easy, convenient way to help others when you’re busily going about the other part of your life.

My wife sat hunched over her computer and beckoned me with her free hand.
“I just got an email from someone’s mom.  Her son can only eat Jevity and there’s a lapse in their insurance, so she’s looking for any cans she can scrounge up until they come through.  What do you think?”
“Perfect.”  I grinned, “Let’s feed him.”
Jevity is a liquid food substitute for people who cannot eat solid foods for whatever reasons.  I had this stuff pumped directly into my stomach via a feeding tube for several weeks while I was undergoing cancer treatment.  Unfortunately, this formula of food-in-a-can is quite expensive.  I was lucky in that my insurance company paid for it.  Others aren’t quite so fortunate.
When I had my feeding tube removed, I had a few extra cases of Jevity left over.  I decided that this would be a novel way to feed those who were not only in need of the rather expensive food, but are ill as well.  My wife and I locate cancer clinic and chemotherapy treatment centers and donate these cans—all adorned with the Rook symbol to those whose insurance doesn’t cover the food completely.
In this case, we had a specific person in mind.  He had been in an accident and is apparently dealing with a lifetime of living off of this particular liquid diet.  We loaded up a couple cases and ensured that her son will have something to nourish himself with until his insurance straightens things out.
It seems that there are many ways to provide food for those in need.
 

He was my cousin and at the time, my best friend. Almost a year older than me, and infinitely more confident, I looked up to and admired him. We differed greatly in many ways.  He was militant, where I was more of a pacifist. We were both interested in the martial arts, however.  He was much more skilled than I was, having achieved a brown belt in Tae Kwon Do by the time we were thirteen. We were both conversant with comics, but not as interested in them as many of our friends.  He was more interested in science fiction movies and I was a fan of mystery novels.
Nonetheless, like many adolescents, we decided to adopt superhero personas.  An avid–though not very skilled–chess player, I always had a chessboard set up in my room to take on anyone willing to play a game.  There weren’t many chess aficionados in my social circle with the exception of my father, which may account for my mediocre abilities.  Nonetheless, the board maintained a prominent position in my room—if only as mostly décor.
It was the chessboard that provided the initial structure for our superselves.  He took a seat behind the white side of the board and picked up a horse-shaped piece.
“I’ll be The Knight.”
“Man,” I grumbled.  “You got the cool-sounding one.”
“No problem,” he grinned.  “you can always be the Queen.”
I made a face, a rude comment unfit for this blog and muttered “Not likely.”  Though fairly liberal in my attitudes of that day and place, there was no way I–as a barely teenaged heterosexual boy–was going to allow myself to be saddled with that moniker.
It did get me thinking, however.  Although the Knight was probably the most “super” sounding chess piece, it wasn’t my favorite.  I picked up the rook from my side of the board and considered it.
More advanced players than I had critiqued my over reliance on this piece, though I found it terribly useful.  Also, the general shape made it easy to use in various super-devices.  The hilt of a sword and the handlebars of the motorcycle could easily be fashioned into the shape of the rook.  It was also an easy figure to draw.
I placed the black rook next to the white knight on the board.  “This one’s me.”
Over the next several months, we drew pictures and designed fantasy weapons and vehicles incorporating our symbols.  All the while the Knight told stories of the adventures he had with his faithful sidekick, the Rook.  Though cast as a sort of assistant, these stories didn’t keep Rook in the shadows dependent on the Knight.  Rook was quick, strong, and powerful, often taking adventures on his own.  Although I was none of these, I found the stories liberating and empowering.
Eventually, my family moved and the Knight and I fell out of touch.  I understand that he joined the military as I went off to college.  The Rook paced nervously, penned up on the back burner of my psyche, while I found myself busily earning a Ph.D., raising a family, and eventually securing a job as a research scientist.
The Rook ground his teeth in frustration as my career waxed, waned, and turned while I became a professor and then left the lab to work in a small clinical practice. The Rook experienced some reprieve as I managed a bit of free time to resume my pursuit in the study of martial arts, the occult, private investigation, and other fields of study that struck my fancy.  My family was growing, my career was developing nicely, and I was developing personally.  Things seemed to be going rather well and the Rook stood alone and almost forgotten, occasionally practicing katas.
That’s when I was diagnosed.
It started out innocently enough…a large lymph node in a non-smoking, non-drinking, relatively youthful and otherwise healthy individual.  None of my doctors could believe that it was anything other than a node that was reacting to some otherwise minor infection.
No one expected me to have stage 4 cancer.  Least of all, myself.
Radiation and chemotherapy have a relatively similar objective.  Try to kill the patient, hope they survive and that the cancer cells die instead.  As such, a cancer patient undergoing such treatment has three adversaries attempting to kill him:  Chemicals, Radiation, and Disease.
I often told my students “We’re all terminal.  We all have an expiration date, we just don’t think much about it. The big difference is that those who have an identified terminal illness know ‘how’ and have a better idea than most of us as to ‘when’.  Having the illusions of immortality stripped from us in this fashion leaves a person with a distinct existential crisis:  ‘What does my life–and death–mean?”
What I failed to tell them is that your disease need not necessarily be terminal to have this effect.  While I attempted to recover and heal from the onslaught of cancer treatment, on the hope that I will survive the disease, the fact that I may easily die became increasingly evident.
What, really, had I done with my life?
I managed to carve out a pretty decent career and my family seemed happy and well cared for.  These were pretty much the end of my goals.  However, was the world really that much better off for my having been here or was my existence as consequential as a wisp of smoke?
Someone pointed out my wife, children, students and clientele in an answer to that question and, although I value each of them very highly, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was enough.
“Perhaps,” a familiar voice echoed in the back of my mind.  “But you could do more.”
The Rook was waiting, ever-vigilant, in the dark recesses for his opening.  He is now the symbol of my attempts to improve the world, bit by bit, beyond the confines of my immediate sphere of influence (family, career, etc) with the time that I have left.
However long that may be.