Most people know the story: Tom and Joe are fishing on a boat in the middle of the river, when they spot a baby floating past. Joe tosses his pole and jumps into the water to save the child, and Tom helps him back into the boat, checking on the infant. They’re rowing back to shore when they see two more babies floating downstream, so Joe jumps back into the water while Tom sprints away.
Joe grabs the children and then turns back to Tom, shouting, “Where are you going, you idiot? Help me with these kids!”
Tom shouts over his shoulder: “I’m going to find the maniac chucking babies into the river!”
You can get a laugh with the right delivery—”maniac chucking babies” has lots of hard /k/ sounds and that’s inherently funny. But the “going upstream” story isn’t really a joke. It’s an argument dressed as a parable, with contested premises and a tidy conclusion: we should address root causes, not just emergencies. The story circulates through public health conferences, activist trainings, policy workshops, and criminal justice seminars like a benediction: go upstream, find the source, put yourself out of a job.
These are my people, so of course I enjoy the story. But when you hear it often enough, you start to notice things. In most tellings, the story is about making non-heroic things feel more heroic. Joe saves the children—clearly heroic. But Tom’s heroism happens offscreen—we’re meant to imagine him wrestling some psycho to the ground and preventing future drownings. Both men are heroes, just different kinds. This equivalence matters to the advocates, policy wonks, and public health workers hearing the story, whose version of Tom’s upstream heroics involves writing grants, organizing campaigns, drafting legislation, or sitting through interminable meetings hoping for three minutes at the microphone to nudge policy incrementally forward. This work rarely feels heroic, but the story insists: Tom and Joe are both part of the solution, both heroes in their own ways.
That’s why the argumentative structure stands out. The parable only works because Joe manages to save every child. When Tom leaves, no one is drowning. Reality rarely offers such tidy arithmetic. The frontline need almost always exceeds capacity, making upstream work feel like abandonment. Imagine the story with children still rushing past, gasping and drowning, while Tom sprints away to search for causes. That’s closer to how these decisions actually feel.
The babies aren’t just metaphors: a former student of mine died recently. I did what downstream workers do: drove her to the police station—twice—to report abuse. Helped her find safe housing. Loaned money she couldn’t repay. Listened. Counseled. Hoped. My colleagues threw their own lines too, tried to pull her free of the river. None of it was enough. The tragedies kept finding her until the last one didn’t let go. So imagine the story again, but Joe stays in the water for more than a decade, and misses as many babies as he saves. Maybe that’s why we keep telling these “upstream/downstream” stories: because the alternative is admitting what actually happens to the babies.
My work now is definitely upstream work. It’s satisfying in its own way—not least because so much of it is writing work. The people with whom I collaborate are heroic, the challenges are interesting, and the details suit my nerdy bent.
But the river story assumes Tom knows exactly where to run. No five-year PhD program to identify which tributary harbors the villain. No chance Tom will devote his life to an upstream intervention that proves worthless or actively harmful. No unintended consequences exist in this world—though what would that even look like? Tom accidentally helping the villain find more victims? Maybe not quite—but it’s easy to imagine that Tom’s carefully brokered upstream solution may well require the babies’ mothers to attend workshops on “parenting skills.”
Upstream work is rife with unintended consequences. Well-meaning advocates for abstinence-only education promote a policy that the evidence suggests will worsen children’s sexual health, leading to more sex, earlier, that’s less safe. It’s painful to acknowledge—easier to assume malice than accept that good intentions can produce harm.
The seductive simplicity of the upstream story makes it perfect for any political perspective. Recast the river as the Rio Grande, make the fishermen Border Patrol, blame the cartels. Change it again: does rent control decrease housing supply? Do some NIMBYs cause gentrification while fighting it? The world forces tradeoffs, but we can ignore that when we’re sprinting upstream to address our chosen tragedy.
These examples will rankle readers across the political spectrum—but that’s beside the point. I want to focus on the issues raised by story structure itself. Whatever your ideology, the upstream story works because everyone can cast themselves as Tom or Joe, the smart one who sees the “root” problem, or the empathic one who refuses to ignore the needs of the real people suffering in front of them. Head, or heart? Either way you’re a hero.
Both Tom and Joe are trapped in impossible roles. Yet J.D. Salinger lampooned Joe’s trap decades ago in a book we all read in middle school:
“I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them.”
Holden Caulfield’s fantasy is pure Joe—an endless, impossible vigil at the cliff’s edge. On Salinger’s telling, it comes off a bit naive, an obsession with the pure victim, the complete innocence and authenticity of childhood that ignores all the complexity with which system-tinkering Toms are forced to wrangle. Unlike the river with its upstream perpetrator, the field of rye doesn’t need a catcher at all; it needs someone to fence off the cliff.
The story also erases race, gender, and class. In reality the large majority doing Tom’s job are white women, and the large majority doing Joe’s job are women of color, especially Black women. And the babies—the victims and clients? Almost always Black and brown, and always poor.
Go to any social services office, any emergency room, any homeless shelter. Who’s behind the desk doing intake? Who’s restraining the violent client? Who’s helping them navigate their housing options? Now go to any foundation, any policy institute, any legislative hearing. Who’s presenting the PowerPoints? Who’s writing the white papers? Who’s deciding which upstream interventions deserve funding?
The parable pretends Tom and Joe just happened to be fishing when babies floated by. Could it be that Joe’s neighborhood is downstream because Tom’s neighborhood votes to keep the toxic waste facilities, the highways, the flood zones somewhere else? You might worry that Tom is careful not to look too close to home.
The story’s most notable premise: victims are infants—completely innocent, completely helpless. They can’t drag Joe down with them. They can’t get angry when they notice Tom’s glitzy contracts from the lifeguards’ advocacy group, can’t accuse him of “coming to do good, but staying to do well.”
They also can’t help with their own rescue. Imagine adult victims: they’d join the rescue efforts, tell Tom where to look for causes, organize their own upstream interventions. But babies can only float and cry.
The story circulates at conferences because people patting themselves on the back for being Tom secretly wish they were Joe. Joe’s job seems simple—save the babies. Frontline workers get lip service and cheap talk about being heroes. But upstream folks have fancier titles, better pay, more control over resources. Meanwhile, the Joes are burning out, loaded with trauma and unpaid overtime.
The problem that the parable addresses is that the quotidian work of advocacy often feels inadequate. Every policy director wants to be Tom, finding and stopping the source of harms. Every social worker wants to be Joe, directly saving lives. This isn’t to say the upstream/downstream framework has been useless. Childhood lead poisoning rates plummeted because upstream advocates pushed for unleaded gasoline and paint regulations. Drunk driving deaths dropped when the focus shifted from rescuing crash victims to changing social norms and laws. Vaccine programs prevented millions from ever approaching the river’s edge. These victories matter.
But notice how these successes involve clear mechanisms: remove lead from paint, reduce poisoning. Mandate seatbelts, prevent ejections. The villain really was throwing babies in the river, and we really could stop him. The parable works when the problem is technical. It fails when the problem is poverty, racism, trauma—the compound fractures of injustice that don’t heal with a single intervention.
Usually there’s a proximate villain, an opposing coalition who stands between us and the root causes—but when they’ve been defeated the problems persist. Building slightly better guardrails, teaching swimming lessons, arguing about river regulations—it’s not exciting stuff. We’re doing work that’s incremental, frustrating, and impossible to capture in a satisfying story. It involves compromise and dirty hands. The big boss is always some concept or abstraction: Capitalism or Whiteness or Sin or Socialism.
Here’s what I worry: what if many of the world’s hardest problems don’t have maniacs at their source, just complex systems failing in predictable ways? What if the reforms we propose will improve but not abolish the situation? What if there’s no villain to wrestle, no single cliff to guard?
Heroic journeys promise a big save at the end. Would that it were so: mostly we just muddle forward.
