This picture speaks volumes to me, and I’m sure it does to others.
The young man is Michael Maroney, who in 2005 was serving as an Air Force pararescue jumper.
The little girl is LaShay Brown. She’s hugging Maroney’s neck because the jumper had just saved LaShay and her family from Hurricane Katrina’s savage onslaught in New Orleans.
A decade later, Maroney and LaShay have hooked up again. He found the girl who’s now a teenager living in Mississippi.
“I was a single father trying to raise two boys. I had just gotten back from Afghanistan, and New Orleans was under water,” Maroney, now 40, told The Washington Post. “When she hugged me, everything went away. There were no problems in that moment. That meant everything to me.”
As it should.
These are the kinds of stories that have been told and retold in the decade since the Katrina disaster. President Obama went to New Orleans this past week to salute the city’s return. Former President Bush went there as well to pay his tribute to the strength of the residents who endured nature’s wrath.
Yes, we have talked in recent days about some of the failures of government at all levels to do right by those who suffered.
But an Air Force serviceman, Michael Maroney, did his part to deliver a little girl and her family from the storm. “I can’t wait to meet her to tell her how important she is,” Maroney told People magazine. “In my line of work, it doesn’t usually turn out happily. This hug, this moment, was like — everybody I’ve ever saved, that was the thank you.”
They have become friends for life.
It doesn’t get any better than that.