All Hope Is not Lost

Even though I'm as cranky as the day is long (and nearly as cynical), I'm still moved by the amazing things people will do for one another. It's a nice antidote to the end-of-the-world stuff we get on the nightly news.

Last Saturday, I was volunteering for UT. And so were a bunch of other students. In a time when college students are frequently known only for the bad choices made by some, it was inspiring to see so many teens (for they were mostly first-year students) get up early to serve their school.

Even better was another group we happened to run into that morning; Longhorn Volunteers, I think they are called. Whatever their name is, they were also up early to take a bus to Zilker Park and spend the day getting dirty. Since our last tropical storm dumped about 20 inches of rain on the city, our local lakes had a lot of gunk dumped into them that people have been working hard to clean up, and the trees in the park all had to be re-mulched as well. And so these young people got out of bed while many of their peers still slept and gave up a free day for the good of the community.

And finally, to conclude my feel-good morning, I had another experience of just how great the local bus drivers are (truthfully, this is so opposite to my previous experience with bus drivers). There was a mostly-blind man on the bus with me (I say "mostly" because he had one of those pole things to feel his way along, but could see well enough to cross the road unaided), and he missed his stop. Our driver, seeing the bus headed the opposite direction was coming, stopped our bus and flagged down the other bus to wait for the passenger making a transfer. (This may not seem like a big deal, but the drivers aren't generally permitted to stop anywhere but a proper bus stop, and if the other driver hadn't stopped, the man would have had to wait 30 minutes for the next bus.)

People helping people. Serving one another. It's hard to write off the whole world when I have so many examples staring me in the face of people who still care. And so, I must go and do likewise.