by Tom Pantera
Columnist

This week’s Boston bombing had me thinking of, of all people, the single most unpleasant person I’ve ever met.

Cletus was one of my co-workers at a feed mill where I worked two summers during college. Now, to be fair to Cletus – no mean feat, that – the guy had a life you wouldn’t want to lead on a leash. Before the feed mill, he’d worked in a meatpacking plant and from what I understand that’s a little slice o’ hell. And while the feed mill was a more pleasant place than the slaughterhouse, that’s like saying having your hand cut off is better than having your arm cut off. I myself used to literally get nauseous at the thought of going in to work every day.

But still, Cletus was an unpleasant guy. If you were having a bad day, Cletus’ was worse. If you had a hangnail, he had leprosy. I think I only might have seen him smile once or twice and it was the kind of smile you see on somebody who likes torturing puppies. I actually briefly considered braining Cletus with a shovel one night when he said something about my Dad, whom he didn’t even know. But the mill was owned by the company my Dad worked for and I figured that if I gave in and parted Cletus’ skull, I’d get fired and my Dad would get in trouble.

He was a fine example of a man whose life had curdled into a sort of Gordian knot of unpleasantness. Being like that is basically its own punishment. Still, I was a young man and he was a great illustration of how not to live your day-to-day life.

Now, for all I know, he might have been a lovely guy outside of work. I doubt it very seriously, but it might be that he got up in the morning all sunshine and roses and only became a bitter, sour person when he came into the mill. As I said, I doubt it.

But because I sometimes wonder about odd things, I found myself wondering what a guy like Cletus (who is, in all probability, dead; I haven’t seen him in more than 30 years) would have done had he been one of the folks at the finish line in Boston. Would he have run away, or would he have been one of the people who ran toward the explosion?

If Cletus was a shining example of how not to live one’s life, the people who ran toward the explosion are an amazing example of … well, I don’t know what.

I don’t think there’s a word in the English language that reflects the full character of some of the people in Boston that day. Put it this way: Humans are hard-wired with a fight-or-flight response. We flee danger instinctively. But those people not only ignored their hard-wiring, they actively did something that, in this Ayn Rand society we’re stuck in, was against their own self-interest. Hell, it was against their instinct for self-preservation.

Even the people who didn’t run toward the explosions did amazing things. I was particularly taken with the tales of runners who reached the finish line and kept going another couple of miles to get to the hospital to donate blood. I’m not a marathoner and one of the reasons is that I don’t get jacked on becoming that exhausted. Those folks must have been operating on pure adrenalin. (My favorite story was the guy who came out of the fog of injury and immediately, before he did anything else, provided the cops with a crucial description of one of the bombers. That’s some pretty serious grit.)

Every disaster story has its warm ‘n’ fuzzy sidebars. Events are seldom all good or all bad; oftentimes, the good comes out in stories of self-sacrifice and care taken of others. But while I don’t know what it is, there seems to be something different about the Boston tragedy. I think it may have been that people reacted so quickly to do the right things. From seeing the tapes, it seems like nobody even paused to think. They just jumped in to provide comfort, to aid the injured, to show others that in a moment of the worst pain and terror they will ever know they were not alone. There really is no word to describe that; there’s barely a concept.

Not that the bombers did anybody any favors, but they might have at least provided some very ordinary people a chance to do truly extraordinary things.

And in a time when this country is a bigger mess than it has been in my lifetime, we need to see that – and hold onto it tightly. In much of daily life, people appeal to our worst instincts. Hucksters try to sell us things we don’t need and that won’t work, but they tell us those things will make us happy. Politicians appeal to our worst instincts, our greed and our selfishness, and tell us they’ll give us all we want and we won’t have to make any effort. We screw a co-worker because it might mean the boss will like us better and we might have an extra buck or two in our pocket – and then we smile at that co-worker over the water cooler.

But for a brief, shining, albeit dramatic, moment, those people in Boston showed us all how to live. They ignored their own safety and rushed to help strangers. People literally carried other people to where the help they needed was. Only dumb luck saved the rescuers from a worse fate, but they were not thinking, “There but for the grace of God go I.” They were thinking, “People need help and I’m going to give it to them.”

The next time you feel like civilization is circling the drain, remember that. Remember that, and learn, and do a small kindness for someone. You’d be amazed how much better the world becomes.