Mutual Aid

This took place one block from my doorstep, at a gas station. The high curb alongside the lane where cars fill their tanks is misjudged on a regular basis, and sometimes cars get hung out to dry like this one did. The drive wheel (right front) happened to be the one to hang in the air.

The man with the red shirt and the lady behind him had been there for some time, and there had already been an attempt to free them before I happened by. Now without much talk and as more people gathered, we tried to lift it with four guys, then again with eight. Eight did the trick.

When I posted this picture elsewhere I gave it the following blurb:

BREAKING NEWS: Passing West Philly men find a young couple stranded by a high curb at 45th & Baltimore, then spontaneously commit Mutual Aid by lifting the car back into place.
"Alone, you're stuck," one quipped as he snapped a picture. "With a few neighbors, you're Superman."

That was my way of mentioning something that will be understood automatically by most of my friends, but which Peter Kropotkin said much better over a century ago:

In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense - not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species. The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.
- Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), Conclusion.