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Most of the time, life chugs along slowly. But sometimes things happen fast. When they do, people who do the right thing are called heroes. But although their heroism may be a matter of minutes, or even seconds, once those moments are over it falls to others to see that their legacy lives on.

Last year, I wrote about one such hero, a 15-year-old boy and Fulton High School football player in my hometown of Knoxville, Tenn. named Zaevion Dobson. Zaevion threw himself on three girls as gang members unleashed a hail of gunfire in an apparently random retaliation for a shooting the day before. He saved them, but the bullets that struck him took his young life.

With only seconds to think, he made the greatest sacrifice that anyone can. But now he’s gone.

Which brings us to something I saw last week, when Zaevion’s mother, Zenobia Dobson, delivered the Miller Lecture at my law school. The Miller Lecture is usually delivered by famous lawyers or professors. But she came to talk about the foundation she’s setting up, and about Zaevion, along with two of our Legal Clinic graduates, Esther Roberts and Ursula Bailey, who are helping her set up her foundation. I was deeply moved by this mother’s strength after loss, her determination to tell her story, and her plans for the future.

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Zaevion, she said, wanted to be a writer, and to play college football on a scholarship. The summer before he died, he and his brother Zack had attended the summer robotics workshop at Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville. All of that was lost in a moment when he sacrificed his life to save others.

His mother reports that she was heartbroken, but not surprised. Zaevion, she said, had always stood up against bullying, no matter who was the victim. That he would jump between his friends and gunfire was entirely in character.

Knoxville has named a bridge after him, but she wants to do more. She wants to build a recreation center in her Lonsdale neighborhood, and eventually to create safe places for kids in inner-city neighborhoods around Tennessee, and perhaps beyond. To that end, she’s started the Zaevion Dobson Memorial Foundation to raise money for a recreation center (with a library, because Zaevion loved to read) first in Lonsdale, and then in other places.

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After disasters like 9/11 people often invoke what Fred Rogers said his mother told him: "When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’” Looking at the helpers, whether they were New York firemen or the watermen who set up the “American Dunkirk” evacuation of lower Manhattan, made the catastrophe of 9/11 seem a bit less awful.

But the slow-motion catastrophe that is happening in our inner cities has its helpers, too. Zaevion was one, and his mother Zenobia is another. Rather than losing hope, look for the helpers.

And, for that matter, as we face one of the uglier elections in recent history, one that bids fair to leave whichever half of the country loses feeling grimly unhappy, remember that while our politics may be toxic, America is not. Though politicians on the left and right foster division and despair, because that suits their interests, all over America ordinary people — well, extraordinary people, really, just not politicians or celebrities — are doing their best to make things better.

Look for the helpers. They’re out there, if you can see them.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

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