We are all in this together.

I was driving just today down Cypress Creek Blvd. As I was tooling along, I noticed a car stalled in the right lane at Cypress Creek and Sun Chase.

Cypress Creek is two lanes in each direction and passes in front of both Cedar Park Middle School and Cedar Park High School, as well as across the front of a Community College and a really nice community park. At the point this car had stalled, hazard lights blinking furiously, the Sun Chase starts a gentle slope upwards towards the back end of the soccer field complex.

I pulled up next to the little white Mitsubishi and inquired as to whether or not the person in the car needed help. The driver, a young woman of no more than 19 years of age, was rather obviously crying and seemed clearly unsure of what to do. I told her to hold on a second and rolled my car around the front of her vehicle and parked just up Sun Chase.

Not one of them asked if they could help; they simply put their hands on the back of the car and began to push.

Cypress Creek is a pretty busy road and having a stalled car sitting as it was right at the intersection was simply not going to work. So, I instructed the young lady to put the car in neutral and began to push the car forward so as to get it off the street. I instructed her to turn right as we got to the start of Sun Chase and to pull her car directly behind mine.

I didn’t take into account the fact that Sun Chase Blvd is sloped; as she started to make the right turn I realized I would not be able to push her car up the incline. Oops.

Just as I made the realization a pickup truck towing a rather significant amount of lawn maintenance equipment pulled up behind me. Three young Hispanic men jumped out of the truck. Each one was wearing a pair of older jeans and a long sleeve T shirt with a lawn company logo on it. Not one of them asked if they could help; they simply put their hands on the back of the car and began to push. With their help it was an easy piece of work to get this little, tiny 4 door Mitsubishi around the corner and parked behind my car.

When I first jumped out of my car to help this young woman, there were four cars behind her. Each one of those cars was being driven by a man or a woman, all of them Caucasian as far as I could see. Not a single one of them so much as rolled a window down to ask if they could provide assistance.

While I was struggling to push her car, probably a dozen more cars drove by. Not a single one of those cars stopped either. It’s not as if it was hard to miss a lone middle-aged man with his back pressed against the rear of a small car pushing as hard as he could! It wasn’t until these three young Hispanic men jumped out of their truck to help that anyone at all bothered to stop.

Once we got the young lady’s car pushed around and parked behind my car, the young man jumped back in their truck and were gone. About that time the only other person who appeared to offer any sort of aid was a young Caucasian man clearly on his way home from either the community college or maybe even the local high school. He saw what was going on as he passed and pulled over to try and see if he could help.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and I am quite sure there are some people who legitimately believe that immigrants in the United States are somehow a drain. What I know, both from prior experience and from today, is that no one stopped to help me except for three young Hispanic men who probably spoke little to no English and whose day is spent working in an incredibly tiring industry They spend their days pushing lawn equipment, and trimming hedges, and doing all manner of landscaping work. When compared against everyone else that drove by without so much as sparing a glance one might at least understand their disinclination towards spending effort moving a car.

Yet, no one else stopped to help me. No one else wanted to take a second out of their busy and certainly important day to try and give me a hand as I tried to help a young woman who was distraught over the fact that her car might have died. It took the unselfishness of three young men, likely illegally in the United States, to remind me of what hard work and supporting your neighbors looks like. It took those three young men to remind me that immigrants bring more to this country than manual labor or doing the work that none of us wants to do.

They bring family. They bring community support. They bring the understanding that if everyone helps everyone else, no one has to be on the outside looking in.

By the time the two Cedar Park police officers arrived on the scene, we had the situation well in hand. The young woman was able to get her car started and, after an exploratory drive around a parking lot to make sure it wouldn’t die again, she continued her journey home. As I got into my car having just finished a discussion with the second police officer, he said to me “Thank you very much for stopping to help her; most people won’t.”

I am glad that he was wrong. Some people do. Unfortunately, the people who did in this case have to live in a society where other people want them out because they perceive them to be the enemy.

They are not.

The next time you see someone you think might be an illegal immigrant remind yourself that if you’re in a situation where your car is broken down and you need help, the person most likely to stop and give that help will not be a native of these United States. It is likely the person helping you is here from a country that taught him or her the best way to survive is to work together and to show compassion to those around you; you never know when you will be the one that needs a hand.