Never hestitate to help out someone in need
The other night the house was cold so she threw an extra blanket over the bed, I slipped on a T-shirt, and we turned out the lights. In the early hours of the morning, the furnace kicked in and I felt warm enough to kick the bedclothes off and go back to sleep.
That would have been around the same time a man was dying in the cold in the bus shelter at Yonge and Dundas. He would have felt warm, just as I did, because that’s the last thing that happens when you freeze — your body tricks you into a feeling of warmth, a final betrayal. We betrayed that man. And all of us should care about that betrayal because somebody saw him in that shelter, on that corner, at that time, wearing jeans and a Tshirt and nothing else but a hospital band around his wrist.
The fact that he was so poorly protected ought to have been an obvious sign that something was wrong. Why did no one call an ambulance? Where were the cops on patrol? Didn’t anyone notice him as they drove by?
Oh, look, I don’t care what time it was, that’s a busy corner; someone would have seen him.
Maybe his meds were off, or he was otherwise drugged, or maybe he was disoriented or drunk, but even if he was any, or all, of those things, isn’t that more reason to call? We failed him. His death has nothing to do with shelters or cold alerts. It has everything to do with a man disoriented and in distress; it has to do with those of us who choose not to see.
We listen instead to our tunes. We turn up the car heater. We concentrate, not on where we are and who we are with, but on our cellphones and the so-called soundtrack of our lives. Wake up, for Pete’s sake. When you see someone sleeping outside, summer or winter, day or night, take the time to be a human being.
Stop for a moment and ask the person if he or she is OK. If you don’t get an answer — or if you don’t get an answer that you trust — then call for emergency help. Why would you not? Because it is no skin off a copper’s back to come and take a look; that’s what we pay the police to do, to keep us safe. Nor is the price of an ambulance trip comparable to the inestimable value of a human life.
Make the call, if not out of fellow-- feeling, then out of simple selfinterest — you do not want to live with the knowledge that, because of your ignorance or your timidity, you might have been an accessory after the fact in the death of a man on the street.
Oh. I see. How do you tell when it’s right to call? Here’s the edge of the razor: What are the consequences of not calling?
I saw a woman on a city sidewalk a while back, in the summer. It was early in the morning. She was not moving. And she was in no danger from the weather, but I could not tell if she was breathing so I walked over and looked at her and I still could not tell, so I sort of nudged her and asked if she was OK. No response. Louder: “YOU OK?” She said something that rhymed with truck off; so, OK then, good, my work here is done. But there have also been times when I’ve called an ambulance because I was not sure, and I’m not trained to be sure. I thought he was OK? How did you know? When in doubt, make a call and save a life. We’re all in this together. If the emergency services people don’t like that, or the police, tough luck; that’s the job they’re paid to do.
And if there are other numbers to call and you don’t know them or you can’t remember them, don’t let that stop you.
Make the call. Joe Fiorito appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. jfiorito@thestar.ca