A Light and a Glimmer of Hope
In the darkest of times, Steve Guttenberg just became my favorite human
I’ve started waking at 3 a.m. again.
It’s just been the past few nights, and there isn’t a reason, really, but I’d been enjoying full nights of sleep for a while, and so I forgot what it’s like in those dark hours.
When this happens, I always tell myself not to grab my phone, but inevitably by brain starts spinning and I want a distraction. If I’m having a wise evening, I turn on a calming sleep story or try to read a book on my phone, but a few nights ago, I clicked over to YouTube, only to see that California was burning.
I immediately thought of my friend in Los Angeles, and wanted to text her, but L.A. is a big county and I didn’t want to wake her if she was sleeping peacefully.
Instead, I turned on one of those sleep stories and awoke again a few hours later, hazy and hopeful for the new day, only to remember the fires, and more hurt, fear and loss.
How long can we endure this, I wonder sometimes - those of us with soft and tender souls - how long until we finally armor up or join in on randomly screaming at strangers?
Enter Steve Guttenberg, who news outlets keep identifying as an actor, while he politely skips past it and only references himself when refering to “guys like me.”
He kept saying that in the first interview I saw - “guys like me.” He was pleading for people who have to abandon their cars to please leave them unlocked and leave the keys, so “guys like me” can move them.
Then later, I saw him on CNN, shyly confessing to commandeering a car so he could help his neighbors’ pets.
He said his neighbors are in Japan, and he borrowed a vehicle to get close to their house to check on their cats and dogs. Then, when police had to stop him, he walked until someone picked him up, just so that he could feed his neighbors’ pets and make sure they were safe.
He wasn’t sharing any of this for praise - that’s why I’m so touched by his efforts, I think. He continues to give interviews to tell people 1. to leave behind their keys and to leave their cars unlocked if they have to abandon them and 2. that we need each other - that we need to help one another.
I have to say I’m impressed too that he continually gives the caveat that this request is for able-bodied people. He referenced in several interviews helping the mothers having panic attacks, small children, the elderly, and talked about helping a man who uses a wheelchair, holding “his beautiful face” while reassuring him.
This is a man who sees and cares.
And in a world that feels so hopeless, so lacking in love, he’s reminding me that we must say soft, and that even as we do, we can help, we can charge forward; that we don’t need to armor ourselves, we just need to show up and do what's right.
That idea is challenging for me right now.
When we show up, we become vulnerable and exposed, and I have to tell you, my instinct for a few years now has been to turtle - to climb inside a safe space, to protect my belly.
The world makes me feel like a terrified animal frequently. I think that I want a knight or a warrior at my door, but what I truly want, of course, is peace.
I want the fighting to stop. Or I at least want a break from it.
I’m not condoning any behavior - I’m not letting anyone off the hook, but I wish the shouting could cease.
We don’t need to declare winners or losers. I just want people to feel safe again. For the world to feel sane.
But it doesn’t and I confess - my solution; my salvation, has been to hide.
Hope emboldened me this past fall, and so I took a job teaching.
It was a temporary position. I was a last-minute hire.
I was on my own, given far too much power and far too much responsibility, and so quickly, I figured out that the best way to truly help my students was to operate outside the system. I frequently acted knowing that if higher-ups disapproved, I would ask for forgiveness, but that asking for permission ahead of time would grind what should be the simplest processes to a standstill.
I had very little to lose, and so I could take big risks. It was freeing.
It was also frustrating, seeing places where the system fell short, and realizing that that was accepted, and that challenges to that level of apathy were seen as annoyances.
I thought I might go mad, seeing what my friend called “felt needs,” right in front of me every single day, and knowing that programs meant to help were failing my students.
For a while, I turned to all of you, and your generosity helped my class access food and transportation, and prepare for cold weather.
I am so grateful, and I know my students are too.
But I am also grateful that I’m not returning this semester, because while I did all I could for my students, the rest of my life fell apart a little, and that doesn’t work.
I think that’s why I cling to Steve Guttenberg referencing able-bodied people - his intentional choice to use language acknowledging that not all of us are in the same circumstances, and that some of us have more ability to help than others.
That’s true in terms of time and energy and money too.
Those are all finite resources. We can’t plug ourselves in for a recharge and keep going indefinitely.
And the truth is, a lot of us feel beaten down, defeated, exhausted.
We want to do more - we’ve tried to do more, and we find ourselves spent and heartbroken, looking for any sign of hope - of a better, brighter future.
And so now we have it. It’s Steve Guttenberg.
It’s a man who didn't need to do anything at all, and instead, chose again and again to do what he could against an emergency that he tells reporters came on suddenly.
At 9 a.m., he said, it was a perfect day, and by 9:45 a.m. it was chaos. Soon, it was dark as night, he said, and “guys like me,” were commandeering cars and requesting bulldozers; they were hiking uphill to save their neighbors’ pets.
They were doing what they could against the smoke and the terror.
And every time I think of it, it makes my heart open a little. It reminds me of the good and decency in so many. It makes me willing to try again, for another day.
My guess is that Steve Guttenberg probably knows that had helped people yesterday - I just don’t know if he’ll ever know how many people he helped who are nowhere near California, but who still desperately needed a light in all the darkness.
“When all this is over and we go back to normal life, let’s try to keep this empathy. Let’s try to keep this kindness and this thoughtfulness. This is a time that we’ve got to band together - that we’re not one street or one town or one city - we’re one community.” - Steve Guttenberg, actor and hero