True heroism of Good Samaritan rises above social media vitriol
Woman who lost her life stopping to help reminds us what is truly important in life
There are days when you wonder if our planet is simply going to explode in a maelstrom of anger, spite and vitriol.
Invariably, those are days spent immersed in the online world, with its targeted-to-your-viewpoint Facebook, its tweets from twits, or the nasty and generally nameless comments following the most routine of news stories — some troll blames every breakin yarn in this paper on the NDP, for goodness sake.
It’s as though humour, empathy and perspective have been sucked from the human race and replaced with venom, nastiness and vindictiveness. What’s transpiring south of us is indeed frightening — not on a political level, but on a human discourse plane. Can’t we talk to one another anymore about different outlooks?
Oh well, as with most in life, emotions ebb and flow, yet inevitably only arise to the point of action from personal experience.
So, I’d scribbled a column pondering the advisability of bringing in yet more refugees to Calgary during a time of high unemployment. That followed one questioning the wisdom of selling semi-automatic weapons in Canada. Right-wingers and left-wingers haven’t had such a common target since Gretzky was feathering them inch-perfect passes.
Hence, after a day of being threatened and chastised as an outcast from both the conservative and socialist folds — hey, the only political party I ever joined was the communist one, four decades ago, and then only because my sister comrades believed going braless was throwing off capitalist oppression — I sadly opened that once and future hope of journalism, the Willow Ridge News. (I’m not being facetious, actually believing once the current invective runs its course, we’ll again simply like to know what’s happening in our communities.)
There was redemption. Friends of Heather Anderson wrote the piece, in memoriam. For more than 40 years I’ve been a newsman, so tragedies are too easily recalled.
Yes, she was the Good Samaritan. Heather had stopped to help a stranded truck driver on the QE2 Highway just after Christmas, and then both she and the trucker were hit by another vehicle. Both died.
She’d been my unknown neighbour. Maybe we’d passed on the street. Hopefully, I’d said hello and smiled. I can be a miserable twit, so I hope that wasn’t such a day.
Heather had driven her niece back to Edmonton and then, on returning to Calgary at 1 a.m. in nasty weather, she stopped to help the trucker stuck in the ditch.
Pause a second to let that sink in. Then we can easily breeze past the current nastiness, the small mindedness and the hate, and instead visualize a 50-yearold woman, alone on a highway she’d already driven once that day, stopping to help a stranger late at night. Yes, let that sink in.
Who did she stop for? Not that Heather had a single clue, other than it was a human being in distress. It was a man working the tough shift, driving trucks at Christmas in the dead of night because he wanted a bit more money to send back to his family in India. Elayarajas Balasundaram was his name. Doubtful that Heather could have pronounced it. But what did that matter.
Anyhow, her friends Laurel and Crystal felt compelled to write this in the newsletter.
It was better than anything I could pen.
“She served as a girl guide leader, an educational assistant working with special needs children, and she volunteered to run the breakfast program at her school, showing up every morning to help feed children who aren’t fortunate enough to have a healthy breakfast before school. Heather was a loving mother, wife, daughter, sister and neighbour. She will be deeply missed.” Hang on hard to that folks. Not for Heather’s soul, but for our own. You see, Yeats was wrong. The worst may indeed be full of passionate intensity, but the best do not lack all conviction. No, they have it in spades. They simply don’t tweet about it.