The Kindness of Strangers.pdf

I ’ll never forget a lesson that I learned as a boy growing up in New York City. One day, when I was perhaps six years old, I was walking with my father on a crowded midtown street. All of a sudden, the normal flow of pedestrian traffic backed up as people tried to avoid a large object on the sidewalk. To my astonishment, the object turned out to be a human being, a man lying un- conscious against a building. Not one of the passing herd seemed to notice that the obstacle was a man. Certainly no one made eye contact. As we shuffled by, my father—the model of a loving, caring gentleman—pointed to a bottle in a paper bag and told me that the poor soul on the sidewalk “just needed to sleep it off.” When the drunken man be- gan to ramble senselessly, my father warned me not to go near, saying “You never know how he’ll react.” I soon came to see that day’s lesson as a primer for urban adaptation. Yet many years later I had a very dif- ferent experience while visiting a mar- ket in Rangoon. I had spent the previ- ous 12 months traveling in poor Asian cities, but even by those standards this was a scene of misery. In addition to being dreadfully poor, the residents had to contend with the sweltering cli- mate, ridiculously dense crowds and a stiff wind blowing dust everywhere. Suddenly a man carrying a huge bag of peanuts called out in pain and fell to the ground. I then witnessed an a