Lured to the Whales When It’s So Hard to Rescue People in Need

Even as those whales up north groaned and heaved and whimpered their way from air hole to air hole, some human voices complained against all the heroism, unparalleled extraordinary cooperation, and so on. Even as a lady in Carlsbad, Calif., diligently sewed a sling for lifting the whales from the sea by helicopter as a last-ditch measure, some professor of something somewhere remarked sourly that whales get stuck and die under Arctic ice all the time. One man, even as he worked to save the two remaining, softly moaning mammals, said that once the whales got out to the open sea “I can just see those turkeys coming out and turning right instead of left.”

So, always, do altruism and exasperation mix. So, always, does the reasonable mind get crabby, even as the emotional mind yearns to help, to be of use, to rescue, to do good.

There’s simply no point in saying that if all the energy expended in the last days saving the trapped whales had been turned to “saving” the homeless in one square block in downtown Los Angeles, our own poor might be housed by now in pretty stucco apartments, eating wholesome food off plates that matched. Or that if the same energy had been spent in “saving” the hurricane-devastated folks in the Philippines, they’d be eating off plates that matched and all the thatch on their roofs would soon be back in place.

Altruism doesn’t work that way. The urge to rescue, though noble in intent, comes in short spurts. It’s more appealing to the human soul to help two lost whales rather than 20,000 urban homeless because (1) the whales were rescued within a relatively short time span; (2) the whales appear, on television at least, to have better personalities than most humans we’ve seen lately (and this holds especially true during the dog days of this American presidential campaign); (3) whales, for all their rumored intelligence, have not yet mastered the use of the touch-tone phone.

Put another way, if the whales turn left and head for Baja California, with any luck we’ll never see them again. Our good deeds will have been done, and that will be the end of it.

How sadly and crankily do we come to the conclusion that this kind of altruism, this impulse to save, to rescue, is best spent on animals that can’t talk back, or children who cannot talk back. Last year’s little Jessica, caught in that abandoned shaft in Texas, was the recipient of incredible untainted courage, unbesmirched heroism. She was silent when they brought her up, poor little tyke. The men who went down into the shaft risked their lives for one defenseless, inarticulate life, one idea of infancy in distress.

It’s depressing to consider the fact--especially in this week dedicated to the concerns of the American homeless--that perhaps our altruism toward the single, unexpected, inarticulate unfortunates in this world is in direct contrast to our own unwillingness to help articulate human beings whose demands are apt to be both ill-tempered and unending.

Last week a student who had missed the first two weeks of a class that I’m teaching (and I’d let him in late as a pure good deed) called during the dinner hour and wanted me to explain to him why he couldn’t understand Gertrude Stein. “Do I have to dig for this?” he queried. He was irritated with me, you know? And I hate to admit it, but I was griped as my dinner got cold and I explained and explained and explained.

A handicapped man calls to sell me trash bags. I can’t buy any more trash bags. I have enough in my garage for two lifetimes. But he stands on his own principles. He won’t take money unless he sells me trash bags. He’s furious with me, and I’m at the end of my rope.

The Red Cross will barely speak to me--except that they call me once a week--because for now I’m teaching on the day they take blood in my part of town. The quarter won’t end for six weeks, but that doesn’t keep the Red Cross from calling me. Three gallons and one quart are not enough for them. Nothing will ever be enough. (Or so I think, grumpily.)

And in this very week of the homeless, I didn’t give a guy my spare change. He was tall, blond, 25, able-bodied and mightily disgusted with me.

All these things make me at once so angry and so exasperated with my own shortcomings as a human being that I find myself retreating into emotional motionlessness.

What’s the point, I think from time to time. Money is easy to give, but I have no real faith that it finds its way to the hospice, to the homeless. I want to give of myself, or think I do, but I’ll never have trash enough, blood enough, advice enough, information enough. Yes, I’ll explain once again about Gertrude Stein; yes, haul out more than once again to pick up the person in the phone booth who can’t quite remember where he or she is. But a gift given in bad grace doesn’t give grace. Which is why I watched so helplessly, so yearningly, along with everybody else, wishing those whales well--hoping so strongly that they’d find their way to reassuring open waters and thence to the Sea of Cortez to mate and frolic.

Perhaps it comes down to language, after all. Perhaps those soft hoots from those trapped mammals are really ocean phone calls to their own species: “Mom! Pop! Doctor! Professor! Sir or Madam! I missed the first four classes, I don’t understand the book, I need blood, I’ve got too many barnacles all over my body, I’m stuck in an ice floe somewhere between ocean and main, and I need you to pick me up!”

It used to be that knights rescued damsels in distress, who shut up about it afterward and went away somewhere. Now damsels carry briefcases. The overriding sadness is: We don’t know how to rescue the people who really need our help. And so we turn northward, to those sighing whales.