The US Coast Guard Rescue Swimmer Who Saved 165 Lives in the Texas Floods Represents Everything That's Right in This World

Eric Vryn. Getty Images.

This past weekend was one of those moments where I got a reminder I didn't need about just how divided we are as a country. I don't know if the split is close to 50/50 or more of an 80/20 issue. I leave that to the people who take polls and interpret the data. But going into the 4th of July, the algorithm was spitting out the content of people who take to TikTok, X and BlueSky saying there's no reason to celebrate a garbage country like the one we live in. The one that has a founding principle that says you are free to go to "the public square" that is TikTok, X and BlueSky and call said country garbage with no repercussions. In fact, where you'll be surrounded by people who can't stand your opinion but will fight to defend it. With their lives, if necessary. In a world where our supposed closest ally just sent a mother to jail for 31 months over a social media post, that liberty cannot be taken for granted. Or appreciated enough for the God-given blessing it is. 

… they’re shorter than the Apple Terms of Service. 

Then the holiday came. And I spent the 3rd and the 4th in two different towns where all I saw was celebration, pride, and gratitude for how good we have it. Friends and families gathering together. Cookouts. American music. Old Glory and flag imagery on every house, porch, car, truck, t-shirt and bathing suit. 

Plus parades. Both the big, organized ones towns put on, and the smaller, organic homemade kind townies put on. Family funtivity events on the beach where kids did Potato Sack - and Three-Legged races like they were the Brady Bunch in their backyard in 1969. And because I live on a beach, displays of bonfires and "illegal" fireworks along the coast as far as the eye could see. While the police maintained a presence to make sure everyone got home safe. I'm unashamedly proud and blessed to live in this incredible, unique, flawed, chaotic, often ridiculous land. And eternal grateful to my deadbeat ancestor who fled our ancestral homeland to make it possible for me to live in the same proud land that produces The Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders instead of the one that pasty skin and the Potato Famine. 

All of which brings me (at long last) to the horrors of the weekend, the floods in Texas. And the tragic loss of life that resulted. Which again, frustratingly, has become yet another thing to divide people on the far fringes of the sociopolitical divide. Depending on whom you talk to, the rising rivers were caused by Climate Change or by a nefarious government program to seed clouds. Like events such as the 1921 Thrall Flood never happened. When even the devastation of a natural disaster can't unite the victims' fellow citizens, there's not much hope for us as a nation. 

But it would be wrong to give into that sort of despair. Because that is a false assumption. As always happens, this disaster brought out the best in the best and brightest among us:

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… and his fellow first responders embody the very spirit of the United States Coast Guard and the best of what it means to be an American.  

Thank you to the first responders. 

Now, I'm not for one second suggesting the valor Scott Ruskan and his USCG aircrew is uniquely American. I don't assume that if this had happened in, say, Belgium, the first responders would've just said "Fuck that" and run off for some waffles and endive. 

What I am saying is that we as a nation never seem to run out of young people like these. Those who choose the most difficult path in their professional lives because they want to help others, even at great risk to themselves. Who are born and raised with that warrior ethos that's hard to describe, but you absolutely know it when you see it in someone. Who are drawn to that hero life because it's the right thing to do. But who at the same time would never use that word to describe the life they chose or what they do. Case in point:

… single Coast Guard rescue swimmer or any single Coast Guard pilot, flight mechanic, whoever it may be, would have done the exact same thing in our situation.” 

“That’s what we were asked to do and we’re gonna do it.” 

“Any one of us—if anyone else was on duty that day, they would have done the same thing as us. We just happened to be the crew that got the case.” 

I’d love to buy this man a drink or six. He deserves it. 

I second that emotion on the drinks. As a matter of fact, I wouldn't object to a federal statute mandating that every American hero like these drinks on the taxpayer. Though it's more rewarding to take out your wallet, shake their mighty hands and say, "Your money is no good here."

Just try to remember Ruskan and his crew the next time someone's badmouthing this preposterous land we call home. Or decrying Toxic Masculinity or whatever lunacy they've been in a snit about since their Feminist Theory class Freshman year when they declared as Two Spirit and got their lips pierced. (All of them.) Toxicity is bad. But real, genuine Masculinity just fished 165 strangers out of deadly flood waters and doesn't want anyone to think it was anything but another day on the job. Because he's "Just a dude." 

Well in case you haven't heard this before, Dudes Rock. Scott Ruskan and his aircrew are living proof. God Bless, America.