My duty as a human being.

I have been convinced for a very long time that people simply do not care what happens to others unless they're directly related to them. Not my family, not my problem being the silent motto of people everywhere, but certainly here in the states. I have seen children beaten in public malls while passersby studiously look the other way and walk quickly past, inured to the pain of another because they don't know them and so they don't matter.

I've experienced this personally myself. My first year in this city I was hit while riding my bike. At a busy intersection, in a parking lot with cars lined up to get out. There must have been twenty witnesses to see me hit, thrown through the air and thirty feet from my bike. I don't remember being hit. I woke staring up at blue sky, bruised and bloody from my slide across the cement. Not one of those people sitting in their cars waiting for the light stopped to see if I was even alive. No one bothered to call the police. Too busy, in too much of a hurry and hey, they didn't know me and so...I didn't matter. In a daze I got my now dented bike and walked it up the road to a restaurant. I went inside to have a look at myself in the bathroom and found I was a bloody mess, head, shoulder, arm, hip and down one leg I was road rashed and bloody. Here was yet more evidence of the distinct lack of care. None of the employees at the counter who saw me come in, nor the few customers standing in line, said anything, not even to ask if I was alright.

I am not one of you. I am incapable of seeing another hurt or in pain and looking the other way. I have stopped a mother from beating her child in a mall and been lectured by mall security about butting in where I don't belong. My inability to 'butt out' has caused more than one argument with my husband in the past. I was once riding the bus home from work. As usual at that hour it was packed. A woman and a man got on, smiling, and sat up front. A moment later he changed, standing above her yelling and pounding her in the face with his fists. Thirty people sat on that bus and as I looked around, every one of them was looking out the windows, pretending they couldn't hear his yelling or her screams. I stood, I screamed at him to stop and in surprise, he did. He stared at me for a moment before running off the bus and into the night.

I went to the woman who was reduced to sobbing and trying to staunch the blood and suddenly, as if they had decided it was now alright to care, the other passengers surrounded us. They offered napkins and tissues, asked her if she was alright and in all ways tried to pretend they had not been willing to watch her beaten to death just moments before. My husband was incensed. After much arguing, yelling and discussion I came to understand he was scared for me. Scared that the man I stopped might find some way to find me and exact revenge. I would do it again. In a heartbeat. Which spawned more arguments and eventually an uneasy truce where he accepts he can't change what I did nor that I will likely do it again in future.

Today I learned I am not alone in my need to care for the victims of the world. A retired Nepali soldier took on forty armed men with only a knife, all to save one girl from being raped. Of his actions he said "I prevented her from being raped, thinking of her as my own sister...Fighting the enemy in battle is my duty as a soldier; taking on the dacoits in the train was my duty as a human being."

My duty as a human being. This is how I feel and how I wish more people could feel. If more people understood this simple instinct, perhaps there would be fewer abused children in the world, their cries falling on the deaf ears of their neighbors, their bruises uncomfortably avoided by their teachers. Each time you turn a blind eye to the suffering of another when you have the chance to stop it, you cheapen the human spirit just a little more. It is our duty as human beings to help those who need us whether its standing between a woman and her attacker or a child and the parent who sees only a convenient, defenseless target. Don't think 'I don't know this person, it's not my place.' Rather remind yourself that it could be your son or daughter, brother or sister, mother or father and wouldn't you hope that some kind soul would care enough to save them if you weren't there?

Bishnu Shrestha you are a hero sir and an inspiration. Thank you for knowing your duty as a human being.
Article: Lone Nepali soldier defends potential rape victim against 40 men.