Just
Like Me
The Campaign for Love and Forgiveness
website includes some practices for all of us to try. One of them is “Just Like Me.” To do it, you just add the phrasing “just like
me” to thoughts or statements of assessment of another person. So, for instance, when you think: “he’s so blasted stubborn,” you add “just
like me.” You also add the phrase to
positive assessments: “she’s so
level-headed…just like me.” The practice
intends to help us all break down the separations in between us, to amplify the
similarities, the struggles we all face, the strengths we all can share.
Last week, a video went ‘round the web,
and a story showed up on the news: A man
was struck by a car on a
Last year, Girlfriend and I came home
from an evening out just in time to not quite see a man get shot. We had just turned the corner, lined up for a
parking space, when we heard the shots ring out. But:
the parking space was parallel, and it’s a little tricky, sliding
backwards toward the curb. So Girlfriend
went on parking, as the shooter passed in front of us. We wondered if what we thought just happened
really had. We hadn’t seen the other
man—the victim—and couldn’t see him from the car.
But then we got out of the car. And the owner of the corner house stepped
onto his porch, and called into the night:
“The police, they’re on the way.”
A voice replied: “I’m shot.” And then we saw the man across
the street from us, lying on the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the
street.
“I know,” said the man on the
porch. “The police are coming—they’re on
the way.”
For the few minutes—it must have seemed
much longer to the bleeding man—it took all those police cars to arrive,
Girlfriend and I and the man on the porch just stood there, in our separate
places. We didn’t call to one another,
and none of us approached the injured man.
It wasn’t until the morning that I realized: if that man had died that night, he would
have died there, all alone.
In my college psychology classes, I
learned that most people will go second.
If someone will react to an emergency, most of us will follow. But in the absence of the person who’ll go
first…. I read about a bunch of
studies: rooms filling up with smoke, a
person choking during a conference call, a car stalled on the highway. In the company of others who ignored the
problem, most people would ignore the
problem, too.
A young man at my university died of a
heart attack right in the middle of an intramural game of basketball,
surrounded by other players, coaches, referees—many trained in CPR—because
there wasn’t a first person in the room, no one to recognize the real
emergency, no one to react. A man lay on
the sidewalk just down from my house, bleeding all alone—but witnessed—for lack
of a first person. And another man, up
in Connecticut, lay still alone out in the street because the people all around
him—just like me—waited for the person who’d move first.
It’s tempting to command, cajole, to
promise: be a person that moves
first. Read about the people in
But what of all the time between? The hours, days, the ages that we hope will
pass before somebody else collapses right in front of us, is shot there on the
sidewalk, is flung down by a car? What
if, again, first persons aren’t around?
What of all the second persons—all the folks who need a push, a
model—all the folks who acted just like me?
My psychology classes taught me that the
fear of not belonging is what keeps the most of us from going first. I clung to company—the still and silent
company of witnesses—that frightening night when somebody got shot out on my
street. And it’s the company I kept from
him that bothers me the most about the man I kept my distance from, who would
have, had he died, died all alone across the street from me.
Being first, you run the risk that
nobody will follow you—you’ll be alone there in the street beside the
victim. I wonder: if we begin to empathize with all the
frightened and not helpful people, if we begin to understand they’re willing to
go second, just like me…. Maybe that’s
where some of us—some second people—will find the confidence to step out first,
to take upon ourselves that role in a community—to lead.
Perhaps the most fruitful first step is
the step toward one another—the step that emphasizes what we share, that might
lead us each to knowing: She’s afraid,
just like me. Just like me, he wants
help, somehow. She knows what to do—like
I do. I imagine that sense of shared
community cresting like a wave, washing me and Girlfriend, all those people in
Connecticut out of our fear and stillness, off of all our sidewalks and out
into the street toward those in need, toward one another.
© 2008 Melissa Capers