United by the boys
Humanity on display as world held breath
MILLIONS of humans – maybe billions – have for two weeks been transfixed by the fate of 12 boys and a soccer coach we’ve never met.
Yet our anxiety last week and our relief today seems so natural that we don’t really think about what a great thing it means.
Why did so many of us – from Australia to Kenya, America to China – worry for days whether these total strangers could be saved from their flooded cave in some part of Thailand we’ve never seen and never will?
These boys aren’t our family. We don’t even know anyone who knows them. In fact, we didn’t know they existed until we heard they were deep under the ground, cut off by rising water.
Oh, wait. Did I say these boys, astonishingly rescued this week, aren’t our family?
My mistake. Because that’s exactly what we didn’t think about.
Of course they’re family. That’s why we did care so much, and so intensely.
That’s why so many men – and some women – from the four corners of the world rushed to Thailand to help. Divers and rescue workers poured in from Britain, America, China, Israel, Australia, Laos, Myanmar and elsewhere to help hundreds of Thai volunteers, one a diver who gave his life in the effort to save those children.
What’s more, the Thai authorities welcomed these Watch Andrew Bolt on The Bolt Report LIVE 7pm week nights
“foreign” helpers as brothers, too.
There was not the slightest hint of the Thais letting national pride dictate who could help or who could lead.
Indeed, the Thais let two astonishingly skilled British divers take charge of the key part of the rescue, and let Australian diver and doctor Richard Harris monitor the boys in the cave. Harris was even the last diver out at the rescue’s end.
Meanwhile, Americans and Chinese worked together, focused only on saving the children and their coach.
Israeli Jews rushed out with free communications equipment, while Muslim volunteers from Thailand’s south cooked meals.
Only one thing counted. It wasn’t who’d get the glory; it was how to save those boys.
None of the divers bothered giving interviews, or none I saw.
Certainly Richard Stanton, the British expert coordinating the diver rescue, talked to nobody but people who could help.
Sorry. There was one exception, which serves as the contrast.
Headline-seeking billionaire Elon Musk furiously tweeted about his efforts to test and send a mini-submarine, and publicly attacked a Thai official who said it was unsuitable.
Meanwhile, deep under the ground, the trapped boys’ coach, a former Buddhist monk, starved himself to leave more food for the rest, and reportedly kept the boys calm by teaching them meditation as they perched for a week alone in that total darkness, with the rising water at their feet.
I know, some psychologists will suggest we’re really just thinking of ourselves when we worry about the boys. It’s not about them, they’d say. We imagine it is actually us in the dark, and we get anxious to be rescued from our own primal fear.
But isn’t that just a poor and pinched way of saying the same great thing: that we’re family? That we are them, and they are us?
Remember the poem of John Donne that said this best?
Well, perhaps a few of you may – those old enough to have had a true education in the things that bind us, not the trivialities or race and gender that now divide:
No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main …
Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
No doubt that tolling bell is one of the bells in dozens of Buddhist temples that have been rung these past days by worshippers calling the deities to come save the boys.
But it wasn’t the deities they were really calling, and it wasn’t the deities who answered the bells and worked the miracle of that incredible rescue.
It was men and women who responded and restored those boys and their coach to the world.
See, we are the protection we pray for. The gods in the end are us when we are at our finest, and our finest is when we are what we’ve just seen.
It’s when we do act as if even total strangers are family with a call on our sympathy and help – a call this week answered by glad millions.
THAILAND’S MIRACLE, P14-15