IF NOT ME, WHO?

Blog number Ninety-four                              27 May 2007

I''m sitting in Barnes and Noble reading a book when I notice an employee stacking books on a shelf.  He leaves and as a customer walks by, the books drop one after the other until a pile of ten or twelve books lie on the floor.  The customer looks back and keeps on walking.  The employee is out of sight.

I notice that the book I am reading has a sticky red circle on the cover, obviously left by a soft drink in a glass.

We go to Mimi's to eat.  It is very busy - a 25 minute wait.  We decide to sit at the counter.  We see an employee drop a gob of butter on the tile floor.  Waitresses and busboys dodge it to keep from stepping in it and maybe slipping and breaking a bone or two.

Who is there to correct these things?  Who is there to correct these things and forestall a feeling of irritation or worse in fellow humans?  Who is there to prevent more bad feeling from slipping out into the mass that is humanity?

Ever see a shopping cart left in a parking place in a crowded parking lot?  Or left smack in the middle of a parking space so that no one can park there until it is moved?  Bet you have.

Ever ran over a nail someone left in the road after seeing it lying there and figuring it was someone else's job to remove it?  "I didn't leave it there.  Why should I take care of it?"

Whose job - whose responsibility is it to pick up the books, clean the book cover, tell an employee about the spilled butter, put the shopping carts back where they belong, pick up the nail?  Is that your job or is it mine?

The first time this question really came home to me, I was sitting at a sidewalk coffee house beside a busy street where a large object had fallen into the middle of the street.  I watched as cars veered around it and as other customers commented on the danger of that object lying there.  It finally came to me that if I didn't remove it, nobody would.  It finally came to me the real meaning of, "If not me, who?"

But listen to this.  A different book that I was reading was that "Hate Mail From Cheerleaders" that I told you about.  I read about a star basketball athlete that needed a kidney.  Six thousand people volunteered to give him their kidney.  People that had never met him, but because he was their hero, they would give him a kidney.  Now listen to this:

One guy - a guy named Warren, wanted to give the athlete his kidney, but when he started reading about the many thousands of people on a list for a kidney, thought, "Why should this guy receive a kidney simply because he was a star athlete?"  So he volunteered to give up a kidney to the first one on the list or to whomever matched his blood type.  Now you talk about a service to humanity, what kind of a person could do something like that?  Not me.