What can a tornado teach us about kindness?
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This is Ira Glass. On This American Life, one thing we like is a good mystery. Sometimes about really big things, but most times, the little mysteries are the best.
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Shortwavers, follow us to make sure you never miss an episode. New episodes of Shortwave drop every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, short wavers. Emily Kwong here with reporter Pauline Bartolone. Hi, Pauline. Hey, Emily. Good to be here. So today's episode starts with a story that begins about 15 years ago. Right. So we're going to a city in southwestern Missouri, a small city called Joplin, where a woman named Nanda Nunnally lived with her husband and daughter. And on one evening, back in May 2011, the city's tornado sirens went off. Nanda went to the front door to see what was going on.
You could see what looked like a wall of rain or something. And it took a second to, like, understand that's a tornado. That's the tornado.
So Nanda and her husband run to a bedroom closet and they crouch down with their tiny dog. And within seconds, the tornado hits.
It was like standing in between two rail lines with trains going by you. And it's like that. You can't hear anything. And the suction was like pulling your eardrums out. Wow. That sounds terrifying.
And Nanda wasn't sure she was going to make it. She held onto her husband and parts of the roof ripped off. She saw the sky above them and she started praying.
Thinking in my head, if I'm dying, is this going to hurt? Dear God, please don't let it hurt.
But then to her surprise, she had a thought about an acquaintance from childhood, someone she barely knew.
When you truly think you're going to die... It's really strange, the things that come into your head.
Wait, so in this moment, an acquaintance popped into her head? It was the face of a girl Nanda bullied in eighth grade.
Thinking, this is it.
What happened during the Joplin tornado in May 2011?
This is going to be the last thing that happens to me. And I'm like, oh, my God, I never got to tell her I'm sorry. I never got to tell her I'm sorry, you know.
So Nanda was lucky that day. About 160 people died in this infamous tornado. But she and her husband survived. And this memory of thinking about the girl she bullied stayed with her. It's so... Astonishing to me that in a moment where she had every reason to think about herself, she was having altruistic feelings about someone else. It actually turns out there's a lot of social psychology around this. Why we think about other people when disaster strikes and how the very worst moments in our lives can sometimes bring out our best. So today on the show, the social science of catastrophe compassion. How disasters and traumatic events can bring us together. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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