Photo via the New York Times
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The day of the New York City Marathon is the one day a year that the city becomes the version of itself we always hope it might be. There’s glimpses of it every other day of the year, but on Marathon Sunday, it’s everywhere.
Entire neighborhoods pour onto the sidewalks with cowbells, pots and pans, handmade signs, paper cups of water, and anything else they can think of to offer. No one asks who you are or what you believe. None of the usual categories matter—not your politics, not your job, not any of the mundane things that divide us on nearly every other day. The only thing that matters on that chilly Sunday in early November is that you’re out there, trying to do something hard. That’s enough for millions of people to cheer for you without hesitation.
Running the marathon was different than I expected. I knew it was going to be hard. I knew there would be crowds. I didn’t yet know what it would mean to move through them, mile after mile.
It was admittedly overwhelming—the support of people on the streets. Anytime I slowed down, or paused, or in some way looked as though I was struggling, there was someone yelling at me to keep going. From little kids to entire fire stations to the people clearly there to support someone else, every time I thought I was losing momentum, someone else was there to give a tiny bit of it back.
At Mile 22, when I really started limping, two women saw me falter. They didn’t know my name, and I didn’t know theirs, but they stepped towards me like I was someone they’d been waiting to see. One offered me a piece of banana bread. The other sprayed me down with BioFreeze and said, “You’ve come too far to quit now. Keep going.” And because they believed I could, I did.
The day was full of that. The woman I met in the ferry terminal, who messaged me on LinkedIn the next day to say she’d been refreshing the tracking app all afternoon to make sure I finished—and that she always knew I was going to. The people with homemade aid stations—folding tables, orange slices, pretzels, Dixie cups, tissues—set up purely because they wanted to make the day easier for people they’d never met and would never see again.
And the runners: almost sixty thousand of us. Different ages, backgrounds, and lives. Different reasons for being out there at all. None of it mattered. What mattered was that we were trying to do something really hard. That was enough to make people treat us with a kind of unconditional generosity that feels almost impossible anywhere else.
And maybe that’s the point.
We’re all limping somewhere around Mile 22 of something, pushing through whatever personal race we didn’t fully understand when we signed up. None of us know what the strangers around us are carrying—what pushed them out their door that morning, what they’re chasing or running from. In the marathon, it doesn’t matter. The city doesn’t ask you to earn your applause; you showed up, and that’s enough. And so people show up for you—loudly, generously, without needing any reason other than the fact that you’re human and you’re trying.
The thing is, what happened that day on the streets of New York isn’t actually an anomaly or once-a-year miracle the city conjures out of nowhere. It’s a simplification of what being part of a community always asks of us: help whoever is in front of you get to the next mile. But that instinct isn’t limited to First Avenue in November. It exists all year long—quietly, without banners or medals. The marathon just shows it off so you can see what community looks like on a massive scale: millions of people choosing over and over again to help someone else get through something hard.
That instinct has a political life, too.
At the beginning of November, when the government shutdown dragged into its second month and federal food assistance programs froze for millions, the Fordham community came together to organize food pantries at both the Rose Hill and Lincoln Center campus—practically overnight. More than 200 volunteers signed up to stock shelves, greet visitors, and track shortages. Others sent groceries through Amazon wishlists or dropped donations in bins between classes.
The pantries are organized by Fordham’s Campus Ministry and Center for Community Engaged Learning. They’re successful, though, because they’re supported by students and faculty—people who have midterms, jobs, their own families to feed—but who showed up with the same uncomplicated generosity I felt in Harlem.
No one stopped to ask who “deserved” help. No one demanded a backstory or a belief system. They just have a recognition of a need, and a willingness to meet it. It’s the same marathon ethic, carried out in a student center instead of a borough. They serve as a reminder that solidarity doesn’t require spectacle—just that we refuse to let people navigate hard moments on their own.
And then there’s Chicago. In Little Village, where ICE raids have become a constant threat, that instinct has become something even fiercer: not just aid, but protection. The community has built its own protective infrastructure. Bright orange whistles—loud enough to carry down an entire block—serve as warning signals when immigration agents appear. Each morning, Baltazar Enriquez walks the neighborhood, noting suspicious cars, posting updates, and coordinating alerts. His neighbors do the same.
The whistles are a form of civic action built from necessity, yes—but it’s also a refusal to let anyone face Mile 22 alone. A reminder that you are part of a community, and that you will not be left to fend for yourself.
These examples aren’t cinematic. They are not the sweeping reforms or legislative victories that we’re taught to wait for. They’re just ordinary people continuing to step in for one another—more quickly and effectively than the institutions meant to do so. They share the same moral architecture as the marathon: just one person helping another get through something difficult.
None of this is a substitute for policy—and it shouldn’t have to be. A functioning democracy should not need volunteers standing between families and deportation, or college students filling the gaps of a stalled federal benefits program. But the fact that people continue to show up anyway shows something essential about this political moment: our civic life is being held together by people who care about one another. And that matters.
Despite the headlines and the endless talk of the division of polarization, these acts exist. They tell a truer story; they reveal a different country. It’s one where the instinct to help is still strong, even when the broader system feels weak. One where people are still willing to stand at Mile 22—with banana bread or a whistle or a grocery bag. If political hope exists right now, it doesn’t come from Washington. It’s not because our institutions are working particularly well. It’s not even because New York City elected its first ever Muslim and South Asian mayor, or that Virginia elected its first ever woman governor. It’s because of our communities.
It’s from our sidewalks, our student centers, our neighborhoods. It comes from ordinary people doing the work that institutions should be doing—and doing it with more humanity than those institutions have shown in years.
Maybe that’s the real lesson of the marathon. Not that New York transforms for one day, but that for one day it resembles the country we could be. Perhaps, if you look closely, the country we already are.
If we believe that effort is enough—that humanity is enough—then we must believe that helping someone get through the hardest mile of their life is not an act of charity, but of civic responsibility.
Maybe the renewal we’re waiting for starts exactly there: with the decision to show up for whoever is in front of us, whoever they may be, and to keep showing up long after the crowds go home.
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This article was edited by Amelie Arango and Angeline Wu.
Anika Bobeck 
Daniela Cadena Hernandez 
Nia Cruz