Here are the principal rescuers and their explanations of why they rushed to Denny’s aid, each having been somewhere else and seen the beating live on TV:
(1) Lei Yuille, a nutritionist who had just come from work to her mother’s house and watched Denny’s ordeal with her brother: “He said to me, ‘We are Christians, we need to go help him.’ And I said, ‘You’re right, that’s what we need to do’.”
(2) Bobby Green, a truck driver who knew he could drive Denny’s huge rig out of harm’s way for him and was motivated by textbook compassion: “It felt like I was getting hurt.”
(3) Terri Barnett, an unemployed data-control clerk, who watched with her friend, Titus Murphy: “I was looking at it on the news and I couldn’t believe what was going on … Anyone who had seen the way he looked … He was so badly beaten that … the reaction was just, go.”
(4) Titus Murphy, an unemployed aerospace engineer, when asked in court why he had gone to the scene: “Why not? I just figured this person probably needed some help.”
I especially like Titus Murphy’s answer. He assumes that there is a moral imperative that would be obvious to everybody in that “why not?” Murphy seems unaffected by the fact that so many of his countrymen have become downright expert at explaining “why not” when it comes to undertaking any national, institutional or personal course of action that carries a price or bears a risk. And remember that these rescuers actually had a whole lot of built-in why-nots to hand. Nobody could have faulted them for not acting, since they were not even at the scene to begin with and it would be hazardous and hard to get there, never mind what might happen once they did. Their intervention required an act of will and of courage; it was admirably reflexive, but only in the sense that they had good reflexes: there was nothing involuntary or compelled about it. They all had made a choice.
Lenny Skutnik, the wonderful, unassuming guy who leapt into the freezing Potomac to save an airliner crash victim in 1982, is a good example of someone ignoring the why-nots. Would there have been anything easier for him that day than to tell himself that the police and the official rescuers were already there and that it would be stupid, dangerous and conceivably even complicating to their rescue effort for him to suddenly plunge into the river and get involved? “Getting involved” is of course the key, heavily freighted phrase. A lot of people who hailed Skutnik as a hero even saw him, optimistically, as evidence of the reversal of what had been much despaired over since the 1960s as the Kitty Genovese syndrome in our culture. The allusion was to the screaming young woman who was murdered in repeated knife attacks in plain sight of 38 of her neighbors in New York, none of whom called the police because, as one famously put it, they did not want to “get involved.”
You have a sense that people like Skutnik and the Denny-case witnesses begin with feeling involved, that this for them is the given and that the only question is what, if anything, they are going to do about it in particular cases. The “why-nots” they each rejected are familiar to us all. We hear them expressed with great gravity and a comically inappropriate air of originality every day of the year concerning public issues and public actions, and private too-things we know we should do, but don’t. It is always too late, too hard, too uncertain and too risky and the odds are always awful. It might even make matters worse. And, anyway, why here and why now, when we didn’t do the same thing somewhere else or some other time.
Reginald Denny’s rescuers, unknown to each other but impelled by similar purpose, came from different places and just clambered onto the truck or into the truck, or led the way for the truck to escape in an interference-running car. There’s not a single one of the old standbys that they couldn’t have invoked: Why single out Denny when others were certainly getting hurt all over the area? What could they do, being just an individual or two against a mob? Wasn’t it the case that the problem wasn’t really Denny, but the larger stresses between the races and the classes in the community? Wouldn’t this just be a feel-good venture that would leave the basic problem unaffected? And, in any case, weren’t they doomed to fail? There are always powerful reasons to just stay home and profess your virtue and fantasize your valor and maybe even blather about the need for caring and sharing and the rest.
I’m not advising foolhardiness or bravado. I don’t think that’s what these brave and clearheaded people were engaged in. I think they were engaged in moral action and moral choice. This strikes me as especially notable in a time when there is so little bravery available for generous purposes and so much bungee-jumping type daring undertaken for no discernible purpose except self-testing or showing off, and so much interest in a kind of make-my-day pugnacity that is more hormonal than heroic. Lei Yuille, Bobby Green, Terri Barnett and Titus Murphy did the right thing. They didn’t appoint a commission to tell them in six months what that might be. They knew. We usually do. And they were willing to face the consequences. What people!
