Editorial: A day to listen to our better angels

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A year ago, Heather Adamcyk saved a little boy’s life, and a firefighter called her a “super girl.” A week ago, she was arrested on drug and gun charges and faces six or more years in prison.

We don’t know all too much about Adamcyk, who is 28 and lives in Plano, and we would not presume to judge her. A judge or jury will decide her fate, and maybe some court-appointed psychologist along the line will try to understand her particular blend of super girl and troubled girl, of hero and lost soul. At Christmastime, though, we find ourselves thinking about the contradictions of human nature, the theme of so many classic Christmas stories. We can’t help but wonder who let whom down.

This past Tuesday, we read in the DeKalb Daily Chronicle that Adamcyk was arrested after being found in possession of hypodermic needles, four grams of cocaine and a clear glass pipe, which she reportedly told the police she used to smoke methamphetamine. Just a month earlier, we read in the same story, she had been arrested for possessing drug paraphernalia.

In the same issue of the Chronicle, we read that a “sober living home” for recovering addicts might not open in a town near Plano because government funding fell short. And in the back of the paper, we read that President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to be attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, much prefers punishment to treatment for people who use illegal drugs, including pot. “Good people,” Sessions once said, “don’t smoke marijuana.”

He did not say that decades ago. He said it in April.

Somehow, to our thinking, all three of these stories connect. If Adamcyk has a problem with drugs, which two drug arrests in one month would seem to indicate, she might be the kind of person who could benefit someday from a “sober living home,” if there were such a place. And, unlike Sessions, we favor treatment over incarceration for most petty drug abusers. Prisons should be reserved for dangerous and monstrous people, of which there are plenty enough.

At bottom, we suppose, our position is premised on a view of human nature that says most people are not innately “good” or “bad” and there often is a possibility — more so than our laws allow — of turning a life around. There might even be redemption.

Ask the baby in the manger, who was born not to punish mankind but to save it. Ask Ebenezer Scrooge.

On Sept. 2 of last year, a 2½-year-old boy in Adamcyk’s neighborhood went missing and she joined the worried mother in a search. Adamcyk spotted the boy floating face-down in a retention pond. She waded into the chest-deep water, pulled the boy to her and carried him to shore. He was not breathing and his skin was blue. She administered CPR, doing chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The little boy gasped for air and started to breathe.

Paramedics, running down to the pond, told Adamcyk she had saved the day. Later, her neighbors posted a sign in her yard that said “Hero.”

But how do we square that with what happened last Saturday? Adamcyk was driving a car near the town of Sandwich when she was stopped by the DeKalb County Sheriff’s police. A man in the car with her, the police discovered, was wanted in Aurora on two outstanding warrants. In addition to the cocaine and meth pipe, the police reported finding a loaded gun on the floor of the car.

Drug abuse is one thing, but guns are quite another. We are so very weary of the daily death toll from illegal guns. This editorial page favors tougher penalties for gun crimes, not softer.

Maybe we shouldn’t try to square the contradictions of Heather Adamcyk. Maybe we can’t. As we say, that’s now a job for lawyers and a judge or jury. It’s a job for her. But on this Christmas Day, a little boy will get presents because a young woman who sits in jail saved his life. And that should count for something.

Heroes are flawed, and flawed people can be heroes. Human nature is infinitely complex, and we all need a push now and then to listen to our better angels. Ask George Bailey of Bedford Falls. Better yet, ask his angel, Clarence.

In “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the moral of the story is that one ordinary person can do a lot of good in this world, though he or she might hardly even know it. But a second message, less noted, is that most people are not all good or bad (Mr. Potter would be the evil exception) and nobody really makes it alone.

Bedford Falls is full of good people — the pharmacist Mr. Gower, the bartender Mr. Martini, the flirtatious Violet Bick — whose lives would have taken horrible turns had it not been for good ol’ George and the Bailey Building & Loan.

The best Christmas stories remind us to do a good turn for each other, as individuals and in our public policies. They inspire us to work at it all year round.

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