'Look for the helpers'

Name a hospital after this woman already 

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” 

- Fred Rogers

While an awful American betrays his country and as other Americans supinely support this ongoing assault on our values, read about the best person you've never heard of (hat tip to Forrest Dillard for passing on the link to this):

It started in 1984, in a hospital hallway. Ruth Coker Burks was 25 and a young mother when she went to University Hospital in Little Rock, Ark., to help care for a friend who had cancer. Her friend eventually went through five surgeries, Burks said, so she spent a lot of time that year parked in hospitals. That’s where she was the day she noticed the door, one with “a big, red bag” over it. It was a patient’s room 

...Whether because of curiosity or — as she believes today — some higher power moving her, Burks eventually disregarded the warnings on the red door and snuck into the room. In the bed was a skeletal young man, wasted away to less than 100 pounds. He told her he wanted to see his mother before he died.

...Burks wrangled a number for the young man’s mother out of one of the nurses, then called. She was able to speak for only a moment before the woman on the line hung up on her. 

“I called her back,” Burks said. “I said, ‘If you hang up on me again, I will put your son’s obituary in your hometown newspaper and I will list his cause of death.’ Then I had her attention.” 

Her son was a sinner, the woman told Burks. She didn’t know what was wrong with him and didn’t care. She wouldn’t come, as he was already dead to her as far as she was concerned. She said she wouldn’t even claim his body when he died. It was a curse Burks would hear again and again over the next decade: sure judgment and yawning hellfire, abandonment on a platter of scripture. Burks estimates she worked with more than 1,000 people dying of AIDS over the years. Of those, she said, only a handful of families didn’t turn their backs on their loved ones.

(Emphasis mine)

Some things worth pondering:

Burks was doing this in the 1980s when most doctors, let alone the general public, had little knowledge about HIV/AIDS outside of rumors of the "gay plague." We know now that she didn't have a significant risk of being infected herself. At the time, she didn't know that. She went through the red door anyway. 

She did this for years, in anonymity. See more below:

After she cared for the dying man at University Hospital, people started calling Burks, asking for her help. “They just started coming,” she said. “Word got out that there was this kind of wacko woman in Hot Springs who wasn’t afraid. They would tell them, ‘Just go to her. Don’t come to me. Here’s the name and number. Go.’...I was their hospice. Their gay friends were their hospice. Their companions were their hospice.” 

Before long, she was getting referrals from rural hospitals all over the state. Financing her work through donations and sometimes out of her own pocket, she’d take patients to their appointments, help them get assistance when they could no longer work, help them get their medicines, and try to cheer them up when the depression was dark as a pit. She said many pharmacies wouldn’t handle prescriptions for AIDS drugs like AZT, and there was fear among even those who would.

She soon stockpiled what she called an “underground pharmacy” in her house. “I didn’t have any narcotics, but I had AZT, I had antibiotics,” she said. “People would die and leave me all of their medicines. I kept it because somebody else might not have any.”

I remember the political climate regarding AIDS in the 1990s. I'm reasonably sure that if word had gotten out too widely in Hot Springs that Burks was illegally redistributing prescription drugs to HIV-positive gay men, she would've ended up doing hard time. 

To recap, Burks did the following:

• Risked her life
• Risked her savings
• Risked her freedom
• Gave selflessly of her love and time for years in what seemed like a hopeless cause

She did this for a sexual minority facing rampant discrimination from everyone from politicians to health care providers to their own families. She did this for men dying slowly and horribly.

I like to remember that so many of our neighbors are much better than we deserve.