What We Can Do

When a tree fell in my neighbor’s yard, I went over to help her clean it up. I hadn’t lived in this house very long at the time, and had never met that neighbor before. There was no motive in what I was doing, except that she needed help, and I knew that I could help a little. That’s just the kind of world I’d like to live in.

It can be easy at any time – and especially at times like these – to look around at the things I do and wonder what the point of them is. Why should anybody bother to read what I write, let alone spend their hard-earned money on it when they could be buying gas or eggs or video games or little plastic army men?

And yet, I don’t have the skills or the temperament or the resources to do many of the other things that seem more significant.

These are the times when you’ll see lots of well-meaning posts on social media about how important art is. How art will save us. How the world needs your novel, your painting, your film. I’m not necessarily sure that’s true.

I don’t know that the world needs any of the things that I’m ever likely to write. I write stories about monsters and ghosts and nonfiction about horror movies. It’s never going to materially affect anyone’s conditions. It’s not going to shape policy. It’s not going to save anybody’s life.

What it might do, though, is help a little.

It might make someone’s day better. It might turn them on to a movie that becomes a favorite. It might make them stop and look at something in a new way. It might be something that they return to, again and again, because it makes them smile, even if only a bit.

And that’s the best any of us can usually hope for. We aren’t likely to be the heroes of the story, or the villains. In fifty years’ time, they won’t make Academy Award-winning movies about what we did – or what we didn’t do.

Most of us will never save one life, let alone many. If we shape policy at all, it will be as one drop in a sea of collective action.

But what we can do is help a little.