Chain of Non-Fools

There was an article in yesterday's New York Times about a chain of kidney donors. It starts like this:

"Rick Ruzzamenti admits to being a tad impulsive. He traded his Catholicism for Buddhism in a revelatory flash. He married a Vietnamese woman he had only just met. And then a year ago, he decided in an instant to donate his left kidney to a stranger.
In February 2011, the desk clerk at Mr. Ruzzamenti’s yoga studio told him she had recently donated a kidney to an ailing friend she had bumped into at Target. Mr. Ruzzamenti, 44, had never even donated blood, but the story so captivated him that two days later he called Riverside Community Hospital to ask how he might do the same thing."
...
Until recently, hospitals regularly turned away Good Samaritan donors on the working assumption that they were unstable. That has changed somewhat with experience. But when Rick Ruzzamenti showed up at Riverside Community Hospital asking to give a kidney to anyone in need, he still underwent rounds of psychological screening as well as medical tests. ...
'People think it’s so odd that I’m donating a kidney,' Mr. Ruzzamenti told her. 'I think it’s so odd that they think it’s so odd.'
...
Despite his occasional surliness, Mr. Ruzzamenti said he felt driven to help others when possible. And as he considered the relative risks and benefits of organ donation, particularly to relieve a whole chain of suffering, it just made so much sense. 'It causes a shift in the world,' he said.

Perhaps, he said, there was some influence from a Tibetan meditation he had practiced when he was first drawn to Buddhism six years ago. It is known as Tonglen. “You think of the pain someone’s in, and imagine you take it from them and give them back good,” he said.

Mr. Ruzzamenti said he was in a position to donate only because the economy had dried up so much of his work. He was essentially unemployed and could take time off to recuperate. The 30 kidney recipients, he observed dryly, could 'all thank the recession.'"

I also found this comment notable:
"After John A. Clark of Sarasota, Fla., got a transplant on Sept. 28 at Tampa General Hospital, his wife, Rebecca, faced a 68-day wait before it was her turn to keep the chain going. Ms. Clark said that it crossed her mind to back out, but that she swatted away the temptation.
'I believe in karma,' Ms. Clark said, and that would have been some really bad karma. There was somebody out there who needed my kidney.' ”