Free We Can All Do Better by Bill Bradley Page B

better. Since the early days of our Republic we have celebrated those who help their neighbors.
    When we hear stories about Americans who take selfless actions, we’re reminded of what we can do if our heart is big enough, our determination strong enough, and our talent focused enough. There are lessons here for government, too, with its massive resources. If government employees treat their work as just a job, government will fail to realize its potential. The ethos of the nonprofit culture isto give to other people with no expectation of return. The ethos of the private sector is “perform or die.” Government is at its best when it combines the selflessness of the nonprofit culture with the accountability of the private sector. That’s when it can help to transform the country.
    Sometimes a national tragedy calls forth the spirit of our goodness. The greater the need in a crisis, the more we respond to the plight of individuals hard hit by forces beyond their control, and the more we say, “There but for the grace of God go I.” A few days after the World Trade Center towers fell on September 11, 2001, I made my way down to the site through streets crowded with the curious and the caring. I remember the stillness south of 14th Street. I remember the pungent odor of the smoldering buildings. I remember the faces of firemen covered by dark-gray dust as they emerged exhausted from looking for survivors in the rubble. Citizens applauded as a fire truck passed slowly down the street. Hundreds lined up outside a large tent that had been set up for pets, hoping they would find their lost dog or cat inside. I remember the messages and photos posted on makeshift bulletin boards around New York by family members hoping that their loved ones were not dead, just missing. Thousands of bouquets were left in appreciation at fire stations across Manhattan. I remember people sincerely thanking policemen, as if realizing for the first time that the police are there to protect us every day.
    New Yorkers normally pull together in a crisis—a blackout, a transit strike, a blizzard—but September 11 created a deeper response: People seemed more open, more vulnerable, more interested in their fellow citizens. They prayed together, stood on street corners holding one another. They looked to one another to make sense of what had just happened. And they weren’t all New Yorkers or New Jerseyans. Responders came from all fifty states. Oklahoma City EMT workers who remembered digging bodies out of the rubble of their own terroristevent on April 19, 1995, offered the full spectrum of their resources to New York as soon as they heard about the towers falling. Firefighters and EMT workers drove from Long Island and Westchester County, and from Bridgeport, Connecticut; Eureka, Pennsylvania; Brockton, Massachusetts. The tragedy called out the goodness of people in a special way. The target of anger was clear: Al Qaeda. The source of the empathy was more elusive.
    At moments filled with collective emotion, hierarchies disappear, ethnic stereotypes fade, the walls of fear and suspicion crumble. What is left is the humanity we have in common. Too often, that humanity is masked by the pursuit of material things, the worrying about what other people think, the grind of events to make an A, to make a living, to move up the ladder. Often we lose sight of our human connection. The challenge is to access every day the energy and empathy that fuels our capacities in a crisis. The result would be the making of a different society—one that the stories of the shoeshine man in Pittsburgh, the welcome lady in Phoenix, the freeway patroller in San Diego, the Walgreens executive in South Carolina, the running coach in North Carolina, and the mother in the Chicago suburbs tell us exists even now, if we simply look around. The citizens who speak on American Voices are not all that unusual; they are just in touch with their deeper,