I recently read an article in The Arab American News (March 5-11, 2011) regarding the University of Michigan-Dearborn chapter of the Arab Student Union’s (ASU) efforts to honor the Amer family, in whose name legislation was passed at the end of 2010 to help reform Michigan’s foster care system.

The Amer Act, or House Bill 4118, was passed in December 2010, some 25 years after the Amer family of Dearborn lost custody of their two surviving children to Michigan Child Protective Services following the accidental death of their two-year old son, Samier, after a slip and fall in the family’s bathtub.

The Michigan Legislature and former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm deserve our thanks for their work in passing this significant piece of legislation. The new law will help insulate children from abrupt and disruptive changes in their living situations by allowing family members to have the first choice in caring for children assigned to the foster care system. As important as this is, there are for me, other matters that merit our attention.

As they pursued legal and legislative remedies to a glaring weakness in state family law, the Amer family went through a living hell. However, their resolve and selflessness gave them comfort — and all of us, pause — in what they have done for families across the state of Michigan.

In a day when immigrants and minorities, particularly Muslims, are looked upon far too often with a suspicious eye, and unfairly seen as self-serving, the Amer family will force many to think twice about their assumptions and biases.  The Amer family chose to fight for something that they knew would not benefit them —that would not reassemble their family broken apart by a broken system.  They could have surrendered to anger and bitterness. But they saw more, they saw how to serve others…others who would very likely not be Arab American or Muslim or, for that matter, of any particular faith, or none at all.

The ASU, in choosing the Amer family to honor at their March 18 banquet, also gives us something to remember.  As a student organization, the ASU operates primarily on adrenaline, determination, principle and on what funds they are lucky enough to find. Yet, here they are, honoring a family and their suffering – while leaving hot domestic and foreign issues for another day – at their 2011 banquet; and, as they did so, furthermore, donated a hefty portion of the event’s proceeds to the local chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC).  ASU is demonstrating how to put community first; how to give back; and, how to pay it forward – even in this difficult economic environment.  It’s not about how much the ASU may donate to ADC but the fact that they have chosen — as the Amer family has done — to put the greater good first.

Thinking of the greater good is also a lesson that I have learned  from my parents who grew up in the Lebanese neighborhoods of Charleston, West Virginia.  Every family took a degree of responsibility for every other family. Maybe we should think about that, and how to replicate the example of my parents, the ASU and the Amer family.  Thinking of the greater good might be a cliché, but the results of doing so are not cliché.  In the final analysis, we may not always feel as though we are of the same village, but we are, in fact, bound together by what happens to the other, regardless of where our village may be.

Michael Bsharah is President of Bsharah Public Relations, a firm located in Dearborn.