It’s a sad state of affairs when someone needs to resort to selling precious family heirlooms to fund their parent’s life-saving medical care, and we need to write articles celebrating the kindness of strangers that pitched in to help them.

But that’s where we are in 2019. Sure, people are awesome – the way a community can rally to help out one of its members is wholesome and beautiful and shows the very best of our humanity. We are by nature social, empathetic animals and we will continue to look out for each other in a society that is increasingly individualistic, selfish and competitive.

This story is a timely reminder of this. Redditor u/MrElonMusk420 found himself in a desperate situation, needing to urgently raise funds for his mom’s medicine.

The poor woman has not only had to suffer through the trauma of a cancer diagnosis and months of brutal chemo, but she’s had to drain her life savings to fund her own care. So now she’s broke, too.

Her son is humble and enterprising and is obviously doing his best to help his mom get through this. I’m sure his grandfather would be proud of him!

Although it sucks to have to give up a treasured family memory like this, needs must when the devil drives. Sadly, in America, nobody else is going to help.

No money? No care.

In the absence of a humane healthcare system, it is up to small communities like this to look after themselves. The response to this desperate son’s post was wonderfully affirming and left him in floods of gratitude tears.

Beautiful or what? Mr. Elon left an emotional update on the situation later on

The whole story is a bittersweet reminder of the current state of affairs. Humans are intrinsically awesome and we are still more than capable of organizing ourselves as a community to help out those in need. But why does it need to come to this? Crowdfunded life-saving medical care should not become the norm in any developed nation.

Surely the safety net should be much, much higher than a knife swap group on Reddit?

Here’s what people had to say about the heartwarming story

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