A Suburban Barn Raising

In the excellent movie "Witness" starring Harrison Ford, there are two scenes that I particularly love. The first is the one when Ford, a police detective in hiding as an Amish man, beats the crap out of an obnoxious tourist. The other is a scene where members of the Amish community gather together to help a family raise a barn.

I thought about this second scene last week when a couple of fellow NJ Transit train commuters and I were walking back from our station en route to our homes and encountered an elderly gentleman who had suffered a front flat tire and had left his car in the middle of the street. My next door neighbor, who was at the scene first, was with another commuter trying to help the gentleman. The elderly gentleman was sadly a combination of disoriented and despondent, and we struggled to try to understand him due to a very thick European accent. He shared with us that his wife had recently passed away, and we did our best to simultaneously console him and troubleshoot the problem at hand.

The group of five of us first tried to call for a garage or roadside service that could help him fix his flat, but found little success. One of the ladies took the man's keys and drove the car out of the middle of the street and into a little standing area. After calling the local police department and waiting in vain, we just decided to change the flat ourselves. We cooperatively cleared out his trunk, located the spare tire and the jack and went ahead and changed the tire. As we were doing this, we all took turns either fixing the tire or consoling him as he continued to choke up about his recently deceased wife. I looked up a nearby auto service center, gave him the phone number and address, and we collectively coached him that he could drive on the spare temporarily, but he would need to go and get a permanent replacement soon. The man emotionally thanked us, and we all went our separate ways.

I walked away praying for the gentleman and wondering if there was more that I could have or should have done to help. I also walked away feeling that I had experienced a glimmer of what makes (and can make) suburban community great. In some ways, this was a suburban example of the barn raising scene in "Witness", which also happens when neighbors gather to make meals for people who are sick, and men gather together to help a neighbor put up a shed.

I was affirmed that these were a bunch of upper-middle class suburbanites - the (let's estimate) 3% who supposedly don't give a crap about each other much less total strangers. These are the people who (as I've mentioned before) supposedly value convenience, privacy, self-order and the accumulation of material possessions at the expense of shared community, human interaction and spontaneity. It struck me that six people didn't need to solve this problem, but nobody wanted to leave. Nobody rushed off and said, "Well, you guys don't need me, I need to go back to my godless suburban existence and watch FiOS on my big-screen TV," or "Okay, I'm out of here. I need to balance my ample 401k holdings." Every person just knew that their place was to stay there and help this man.

I'm not fast-tracking these people (and certainly not myself) for sainthood. But I'm encouraged that decency and a desire to help a stranger in need still exists in places which might surprise some people.