| crystalsmom | 11-30-2007 04:02 PM |
The Kindness of Strangers
This was in our Akron paper today and I thought you might like to read
I was driving south on state Route 8 recently, when suddenly I was forced to slam on my brakes in order to avoid hitting the car in front of me, which had come to a virtually complete stop for no apparent reason.
As I craned my neck a bit farther, I noticed the cause of the abrupt change in traffic flow: Two small dogs were darting back and forth across the three lanes of traffic.
The dogs seemed unperturbed by the bevy of drivers honking their horns. As a rear-end accident seemed inevitable, I pulled off to the side of the road and fished around in my purse for my cell phone to call 911. When I looked up from my purse, the sight I saw caused a depressing, tense situation to become, in my mind, a beautiful reminder of why Northeast Ohio is such a wonderful place to live.
At least five cars had pulled to the side of the road, including a city cab. The drivers were sitting with their doors open, whistling for the dogs and inviting them into their cars. A few people stepped out of their cars and tried to safely cross the traffic to capture the dogs, who were still frolicking obliviously on the highway.
These people represented different races, genders, ages and, likely, socioeconomic classes. But they transcended all these differences to work toward the same goal: removing the dogs from the highway before the animals were killed or an accident occurred.
The sight moved me to tears.
Finally, a young man in a truck full of construction equipment captured one of the dogs and put it safely in the back of the truck. A middle-aged couple in an SUV caught the other one.
I exited the highway and pulled into the parking lot at the University of Akron, where I work. I dug a quarter out of my purse — not for my own meter, but to put into the expired parking meter of the car parked next to me.
Shamefully, I would normally never pay attention to such a thing, but I had just been so powerfully reminded that the reason the human species has survived this long is because we have learned how to take care of one another and the life around us.
We may suffer inconveniences, such as taking a hyperactive dog to an animal shelter when we might already be late for an appointment, but it is our willingness to be inconvenienced that allows us to survive. We live because we take care of each other.
If we can use this principle to guide our split-second decisions on a highway on an otherwise uneventful day in October, why not also use it to guide our relationships in our families, our friendships, our convictions, our law-making, our business practices and our foreign policy? What I saw that day reminded me how amazing the people of Akron truly are for remembering to care about one another, and I feel honored to live and work in this area. | 