Genius of ordinary Americans in the USA and elsewhere

 

fast-food table and benches with uneven floor: napkin solution

Stopping for a snack at a hamburger franchise, just after getting ready to leave the booth, this small gesture of kindness caught my eye. It is the unsung solution to a practical problem that a fellow diner identified, took ownership of, and used local materials to fix. And while the immediate beneficiary may have been the person alone or those she or he was dining with, the stability of the table goes on to benefit others for days or weeks; at least until a cleaner goes beyond sweeping and douses the floor in water to mop up. That could dislodge or perhaps weaken the napkin solution to the tippy table.

Why would a customer intervene and fix the problem rather than ignore it, complain to the supervisor directly (or from a distance if going online to lodge a complaint)? It is true that not every customer is inclined to veer outside their lane in the role of consumer. But it happens often enough, that there must be some precedent, cultural expectation, or personal satisfaction in making things work better - big or small. Perhaps the rate of interaction or engagement parallels the findings of Website engagement: estimates of the proportion of website visitors who actually proceed deeper or who respond to surveys and other forms of interchange say that maybe a maximum of 3% of the people go beyond passive consumption of scrolling and actually start clicking and writing. That is something like the proportion of people in civil society in the USA who show up to demonstrate, communicate with elected officials, run for positions paid or volunteer, or who belong to service clubs like Lions, Kiwanis, Rotary, and many others. In other words, even though it is only a thin slice of the demographic pie, these people account for a disproportionate amount of social infrastructure, vision, engagement, and accountability.

Impressionistically, this willingness in certain circumstances to leap from spectator to player on the field may be related to the colonial phases of occupying and modifying the land and water, displacing (or worse) the people and other living plants and animals of the place. When there are few or no authorities and experts to call upon in a frontier setting, it is up to the person and those nearest to hand all to work to fix the problem - both the kind affecting many people (risk of riverbank erosion and flooding; oncoming wildfire; stampedes of buffalo) and the kind affecting just one neighbor, but too big for one person to respond to. That experience for most people residing in 2025 USA is many generations in the past, and yet something of the outlook (dismissing authority, celebrating skillful problem-solving and practical mindset, optimism, and minimizing pretense so that everyone can be equal in the moment) does seem to persist - reproduced in family stories, popular culture (books, movies, classroom projects), and so on. 

No matter what theory best explains local people or strangers passing by to spot a problem and then speak up or directly intervene, the fact is that such things do arise from time to time, normally without public awareness, accolades or other formal acknowledgement: just solving the problem is its own reward in this culture logic. So here is a bow or tip of the hat to all those unnamed people who quietly fix things that many others benefit from.