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walter-carr-cbs.jpg

But There's Also a Lot of Goodness in the World

By Dustin Rowles | Miscellaneous | July 18, 2018 |

By Dustin Rowles | Miscellaneous | July 18, 2018 |


walter-carr-cbs.jpg

I don’t typically fall hard for these feel-good human interest stories, but there’s something about the story of Walter Carr that struck a nerve and reminded me so much of the inherent goodness of the people in the South, in spite of their often inherently evil politics.

Carr is a college kid, who lives out in Birmingham, Alabama. He recently got a new job working as a mover, and his first gig was 20 miles away from his home. The problem? His car broke down, and he couldn’t find a soul to take him to work. Carr didn’t want to miss his first day on the job, however, so he decided to do the only thing he could: He walked to work.

For an 8 a.m. gig, Carr left at midnight, reasoning that it would take him 8 hours to walk the 20 miles to work. After four hours of walking, Carr’s legs were killing him, so he decided to sit down for a second. At 4 a.m. In the middle of nowhere Alabama.

A police car pulled up and the officer, identified by the news site AL.com as Mark Knighten, asked if Carr was all right. Carr said yes, and explained what he was doing.

Carr is Black, and if you’re a cynical person like me, this is where you start to feel like you’re watching the final scene in Get Out when the police car pulls up. Thankfully, nothing bad happened. Carr explained the situation to the officer, the officer took the kid out for a meal and dropped him off at a church where he’d be safe. A while later, as Carr continued his walking trek toward work, another police officer came by, said he’d heard about Carr’s situation, picked him up and drove him the last four miles.

The officer dropped him off at the house where he was to start the moving job and explained the situation to the homeowner, who offered Carr a bed to take a nap. Carr declined and said he wanted to get started on the job.
After he finished, he somehow had the energy to play basketball with the homeowner’s three sons. Afterward, he got a ride home with one of his new co-workers.

Good story, right?

Well, there’s more. That homeowner, so inspired by Walter Carr, started a GoFundMe page to raise money to pay for Carr’s car repairs. She wanted to raise $2,000.

She raised $37,000.

But there was no need to pay for those car repairs, however, because after Carr’s boss at the moving company found out about what Carr had done to get to his first day at work, he gave him his car.

“The lesson of my story is it’s great to reach people, I always wanted to inspire people,” Walter Carr said. “Don’t let nobody tell you you can’t do something. It’s up to us whether we can.”

There’s a lot of cynical things I could add to this story — and I’m sure some of our commenters will do so — but fuck it, I’m leaving it, as is. A good kid walked 20 miles to work, and his customer repaid him with $37,000 and his boss gave him his car. Let’s leave it at that.

Source: WashPo (Image via CBS)