An American Lion

The Blind Side

I’m sure you know the story already, but just in case you haven’t heard it yet:

Sometimes ordinary individuals, just following their hearts, strike a chord with the American people, and a wave of public admiration turns them into celebrities.

We would be better off as a society, especially as we enter the holiday season, if that happens to Leigh Anne Tuohy. That would mean the country might have a conversation with itself about the importance of individual responsibility.

The Real Life Tuohy Family, Friends, and Michael Oher

Mrs. Tuohy is a white, very evangelical Christian, who was raised by a racist father. She lives in wealthy, white suburban Memphis, the kind of place some social critics like to look down at with jaundiced eyes and knowing glances.

But she did something extraordinary a few years back, something difficult to imagine many who look disapprovingly at her Christian lifestyle would do.

She literally took a 350-pound, illiterate and practically mute, black kid off the streets where he had lived for years into her very fancy home.

Because her husband’s high school classmate wrote a book about the Tuohy family’s experience, Mrs. Tuohy has already become semi-famous to the relatively small book-reading world. But when the movie version of “The Blind Side” begins showing in movie theaters Friday, with her character played by Sandra Bullock, Mrs. Tuohy’s actions will get a lot of people talking.

Extraordinary is not the word for it. Miraculous, especially in this divided, nasty, resentful, unhappy nation of ours. I don’t know when I have ever seen America so divided over race, class, religion or simply north versus south. I do know one thing: there are good people out there, and their example should inform us all.