Finally, something good has happened in the dumpster fire that is currently the US of A, and I don’t know how you’re feeling these days, but it’s about damn time.
A man in Florence, Alabama held a stranger’s baby in a physician’s waiting room and yes, this is NEWS. Because lately? We are drowning in a sea of racism, hatred, and terror, and right about now we could all use a reminder that there is still hope for humanity.
Natasha Wilson snapped the now viral photograph and posted it to her Facebook page on Tuesday, where it has received over 1.3 million likes and 77,000 comments to date.
According to Natasha’s account, a woman walked into the doctor’s office waiting room holding her sleeping baby and was handed paperwork to fill out. Unsure of how to juggle her sleeping child while simultaneously filling out the patient forms (because contrary to popular belief, moms don’t actually have 8 arms), the mom accepted an offer of help from an elderly man sitting across the room. Natasha writes in her Facebook post:
I was in the waiting room at the doc office today and this lady walked in with her sleeping baby! They handed her paperwork to do & as she was sitting there trying to figure out how to hold her sleeping baby while filling out the paperwork, this man, from across the room, asks her if she would like for him to hold her baby while she did her paperwork!! She smiled and said that would be wonderful!!
She goes on to say that the stranger went over and “rocked and loved on that baby like he was his!! My heart Melted!!!”
Awww, and so did ours.
Wilson also isn’t afraid to acknowledge the obvious. The man is white and the mother and her baby are black, which, in the world we SHOULD be living in, shouldn’t make any difference, but this is ‘Merica, ladies and gentlemen.
Racism is still VERY real in our society today BUT THIS MAN GAVE ME HOPE & a sweet memory I’ll never forget!!
In an interview with CBS News, the mother of seven talks about why the moment impacted her so much.
“It was touching for me because my children are biracial.” It was heartwarming “especially because he was an older white man, just completely not thinking anything of race. Just loved on this baby as if it was his baby. He completely saw nothing of color, and neither did that mom.”
After posting the picture, Natasha was contacted by the man behind the random act of kindness, Joe Hill. Inside Edition reports that in a phone conversation between the two, Joe told Natasha why he did it.
That’s just who I am. I’ve never thought about race or color. All the children I know call me Papa Joe.
Huh. A decent human being just doing something, well, decent, for a fellow human being. Imagine.
Natasha has also been in contact with the child’s mother, whom she only identifies as Mrs. West. She took the precaution of covering her face in the photo in an effort to protect the mom from the inevitable online trolls ridiculously ridiculing her for handing her child to a stranger. Apparently they’ve never heard the term, it takes a village.
In the past week alone, a crazy man has opened fire in a Pittsburgh synagogue, killing 11 people while screaming, “All Jews must die!”; a white man has shot and killed two black people in a Kroger supermarket, saying, “Whites don’t shoot whites”; and a South Park woman has harassed two African-American sisters in front of their apartment complex. While it would appear as though we are taking giant strides backward when it comes to racism, one photo showing otherwise has united the world, for this moment at least.
But Wilson takes no credit for the picture.
I’m just a small-town girl with a big mouth. It has nothing to do with me. It’s God’s way of saying, ‘People we can really love each other.’ It just takes each one of us to teach our children there is no color, there is no hate.
Amen, sister.