Everybody’s Got A Choice
A Dream

Last night I found myself pacing along the riverfront. Up ahead was a lone tree, stripped by winter of its leaves, and down among the roots I saw a man crouched. As I approached, I mistook his activity for prayer—it was just the sort of dark, still night that transforms the land into a makeshift cathedral. The closer I came, the better I could see him, and suddenly it was obvious that he was hard at work. He had thrown a thick rope around the tree trunk and now struggled over the knot.
    “Nice night,” I said.

    He stood to admire the knot, and then (without a word to me) began to drag the heavy coil of rope toward the water.

    “What are you doing?” I asked.

    He pointed out over the water, and for the first time I saw them. Hundreds of people bobbing up and down on the waves. Heads flashing briefly in the moonlight and then submerging, hands clutching at air. I glanced upriver and found that the procession of drowning people stretched to the horizon. And downriver, I was surprised to notice a feature of the landscape that had escaped me on my previous nighttime jaunts: a ferocious waterfall.

    “What a terrible sight! We have to do something!”

    My companion grunted for me to help with the rope. Together we manhandled it down to the water’s edge, and then with a mighty heave he cast it out to the drowning masses.

    “Grab the rope!” I shouted. “Grab it and we’ll pull you in.”

    If anyone heard me, they didn’t reply. The churning of the waterfall grew oppressively loud. It was a hopeless situation. A lifeline cast into this dark confusion was little better than nothing.

    We waited. A pair of hands clamped on to the rope, pulling it taut. I was ready to reel the line in, but the hands let go and the tension disappeared.
    I pointed to the limp rope: “We have to do more than this.”
    But the man who had seemed so anxious to help simply folded his arms and looked out over the water. I would have shaken him into action, but just as I was reaching for him, a head bobbed out of the water almost at my feet. It was gone before I could react, but I thrust my hands down into the blackness until I felt the body twitching beneath my fingers. I strained for more reach and finally managed to grasp the person’s hair. With all my strength I hauled the body up from the depths and wrestled it up onto the shore. It was a boy of eight or nine years old.
    “We have to pull them out!” I said.

    My companion stooped down over the boy, putting his ear close to the boy’s mouth, like he was listening for words.

    I asked if he knew CPR, but he shook his head. “Then what are you doing?”

    For the first time he spoke. “The boy has to choose.”

    My head began to ache. “Choose what? Come on! There are others to save.”

    Just then I spotted something in the rushes: the outline of a white rowboat. I was there in a second, tossing tackle in search of the oars. If we could get this thing on the water, we could drag people into the boat and then bring them to shore.  I turned to find my companion, to urge him to make haste, but when I looked back I saw—to my horror—that he was sliding the boy I’d taken from the water right back in!
    “No!” I screamed. I charged him with one of the boat’s oars. “What are you doing? Do you want them to perish?”
    He smiled. “You can’t just drag them out. They have to choose. You can’t force them.”
    Force them? Was he insane?

    “They can’t choose!” I said, raising the oar.

    “If they want to, they can grab the line.”

    “That’s just it,” I said. “They can’t grab it, even if they want to. Can’t you see?”

    With the oar, I pointed out over the water. The current was moving faster and more treacherously through the rocks. As I looked, I saw an elderly man, his body twisting through the rapids, a look of utter dismay on his blue features. The hands, thousands of them, pierced the water, and I could have sworn that each of them was reaching for the oar in my hands, willing me to pull them from the waves.
    I grabbed my companion and forced him down to the boat. He frowned at my burst of violence but I hardly cared. As I rowed onto the river, he began his pedantic sermonizing again.
    “These people have a choice,” he said. “They can continue in the direction they’re going in, and that means certain destruction. Or, they can reach out to the line I’ve given them.”

    “That’s not enough,” I shouted. “We have to save them.”

    “We are saving them,” he said.

    “No, that’s not salvation. You’re throwing a line, and leaving them to do the rest. You expect them to save themselves.”
    He shook his head. “No one can save himself.”
    “If it was left up to you, no one would be saved!”
    He said: “Hey, everybody’s got a choice.”