We have a garden in our community to honour persons who, during times of conflict or genocide, act in order to rescue members of the other people. In every conflict you have a few such cases - Armenia, WWII, Rwanda, the Middle East...

The actions of such persons are altruistic in every way - not only do they receive nothing in return, but they are maligned, lose standing within their own community, may risk their very lives, and afterwards their stories are usually forgotten - because they later become uncomfortable or inconvenient for both sides to the conflict. (The community of the perpetrators may feel shame that some people acted more kindly, and the community of the victims may find it inconvenient to remember that not every member of the community of perpetrators acted uniformly badly.)

Such saviours are the true guardians of our humanity at times when it grows exceedingly thin and tenuous. Because, as one has ample opportunity to notice, during an acute conflict people grow extremely aware of the suffering on their own side and, to the same degree, oblivious to the suffering of the other people. If humanity means the ability to feel empathy towards fellow human beings during time of need, this is often the first thing to go at such times. It therefore becomes all the more necessary to preserve one's humanity, if one is not to lose one's soul. There are so many who go through life with dark corners in their memories that they are afraid to enter.

This kind of altruism, of heroism, is definitely worth attention, and worth remembering, because it can serve as a useful light for others to follow when the time comes that they need to face similar choices. And such stories do not cover up that a genocide has actually taken place.

Because I live in an area of the world in which there is intense human suffering, when a story like the rescue of some children from a cave in Thailand is commanding all the media attention, I just can't help wondering what other stories are being currently missed. Does anyone else remember why the Rwanda genocide wasn't big news in America? The news channels happened to be preoccupied with O.J. Simpson. But what to do, bad news is boring, and it isn't so sure that saturating the air waves with this on a constant basis actually helps at all. The war in Syria is still going on. There is no justice for Palestine. The Rohingya are still being ethnically cleansed, the civil war in the DRC continues as usual. Whatever.