Two times in the last week I’ve come across this idea that “you’d’ve done the same thing.”
The first time was as I was finishing reading John Steinbeck’s classic novel The Grapes of Wrath that traces the Dust Bowl-era journey of the Joad family from their ruined Oklahoma farm to the migrant labor camps of California. They meet so much misfortune along the way, as well as some unnecessary roughness and meanness. But they also join with some of their fellow migrant families to share food, shelter, and simple kindness.
In the closing pages, as the Joad family had just experienced a heartbreaking loss, Ma Joad says to Mrs. Wainwright, with whom they had shared opposite ends of the same boxcar, “You been frien’ly. We thank you.”
The stout woman smiled. “No need to thank. Ever’body’s in the same wagon. S’pose we was down. You’d a give us a han’.”
“Yes,” Ma said, “We would.”
“Or anybody.”
“Or anybody.” (p. 606)
Then on Friday evening, Tracy and I went down to the Chattanooga Theatre Center to see the musical Come From Away, which tells the story of the townspeople in Gander, Newfoundland, who welcomed, fed, and sheltered some 7,000 stranded passengers for a few days after 38 airliners were re-routed there on September 11, 2001.
The townspeople kept brushing off the passengers’ expressions of thanksgiving, telling them (in their charming Canadian accents) “You’d ‘a done the same.” And when one of the passengers even apologized for drinking all his host’s whiskey, the host doesn’t miss a beat: “I’d’ve done the same!”
That’s what I want to believe about humanity, don’t you? That if ever our roles were reversed, we’d have offered the same care and concern to others that they would’ve offered to us.
In Jesus’ famous parable, the man who fell into the hands of the robbers and was stripped and beaten and left half-dead by the side of the road doesn’t have any speaking parts. But I wonder if he had had a chance to thank this Samaritan stranger who saw him there by the road and stopped, took care of him, bandaged his wounds and brought him to an inn and paid for his lodging, I’d like to think the Samaritan would’ve said, “you’d’ve done the same.”