A regular part of my job is trying to reach out to people who have been quietly trying to make their community a better place; the volunteers, the teachers, the fucking. People who rehabilitate injured wild owls in a Quonset hut in the woods, and to a one this is the kind of person who immediately reviles at recognition. The kind of person who immediately says that they never got into this to get praise for it, and that they’d infinitely prefer to quietly plug away at this anonymously forever.
And from this I’ve always drawn two conclusions:
- To always distrust Mr. Beast and his ilk who always want their acts of charity done on film, because the people who really want to do good and have no motives to do it besides the doing it never want recognition for it, and
- That there are, in the dark, in the quiet, always people who are doing good, and the reason you don’t hear about it is because they’d rather die than receive recognition for it, but they’re real; they do exist. And you are never alone