Everyone pitched in, and a couple of people even produced brooms from somewhere and swept the road after the big stuff was moved.

There's a note from Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit about a weekend incident.

THE REAL AMERICA: Once again, the press and media are emphasizing division. But I took the weekend semi-off for a family reunion in the mountains, and driving back I came on an awful multiple-fatality accident just after it happened. (Fortunately, by the time I dug my trauma kit out and got to the scene, there was an actual paramedic on hand — just another passerby, but with a lot of skills, a great kit, and a couple of buddies who seemed to know what they were doing. Not that it mattered in the end, as the accident — a high-speed median-crossing headon — left no survivors. But at least there was someone more experienced and better trained than me to try.) But loads of people ran to help. There were a half-dozen members of the Thunderguards Atlanta chapter (a black outlaw motorcycle gang), young women, middle-aged guys, etc. All doing their best to help and to comfort the victims. When the cops showed up they asked people to move the big debris off the road — there was a lot of it, big stuff like brake assemblies and wheels — which I thought was to open up the road but was actually so a helicopter could land right next to the vehicles. Everyone pitched in, and a couple of people even produced brooms from somewhere and swept the road after the big stuff was moved.

We were stuck there for over two hours before traffic moved, and everyone was friendly, helpful and offering each other water and other assistance. From the tenor of the news coverage most days, you’d never know that this America even exists.

I would add, if the accident was up in the mountains, that it is likely that the firemen first-responders to the accident were all volunteers as well. It is astonishing the breadth and depth of sophisticated "government" activities and services in poorer communities which are actually performed by citizen volunteers.

But I endorse Reynolds' larger point. The gap between the everyday reality of America - easygoing, tolerant, independent, informed, hard-working, caring, purposeful - and the America presented by the Mandarin Class and the mainstream media is immense.

The Mandarin Class need to justify their existence and they do so through their mainstream media enablers. The country must be in crisis for their actions to be warranted. Because their ambitions outstrip the dysfunction, they have to create crises which do not exist.

Americans, meanwhile, shrug their soldiers, ignore the shenanigans and go on doing all the good things they do as free, effective people trying to do the right thing in a complex and rapidly evolving (and rapidly improving) world. The Mandarin Class and MSM disdain ordinary Americans but ordinary Americans deserve citizen leaders of their own calibre, not the effete, ineffective, and ignorant Mandarin Class/MSM.