the kid in the well and the kid in the crappy classroom

The code of the road sounds a lot like the good Samaritan except that the point of the good Samaritan is not so much helping out a guy at the side of the road as it is helping out a guy who is of a different creed, not just different but one that is not liked.  I was going to use the example of the kid falling down the well.  The kid could be black or white or muslim or atheist and we would go all out to help him out.  All kinds of fancy equipment would be deployed, lives would be risked, even people uninvolved would gather at the watercolor and ask how is that kid at the well was doing, and when he was pulled out hearts would be gladdened and nobody would complain about how much it cost and would that end up raising their taxes. 

But that's an emergency situation, kind of a subset of the golden rule.  Once the kid is out of the well and it turns out that he is going to a crappy school that could be improved by an influx of money proposed in some referendum people are likely to vote it down. 

Beagles is right about the code of the road not being applied as vigorously in urban as in rural areas.  One thing in a rural area only so many people are going to go by that guy in the ditch and so somebody better help him before he starves to death or gets eaten by a bear.  On an expressway there are tons of other people who might stop by and there are even city workers whose express job is to help out people by the side of the road so the onus is not so much on you to do something. 

But there is a certain hardness in the city, there is a certain kind of mental armor that you put on as you leave the door.  You have somewhere to go and there will be distractions and you want to keep to your mission.  When I first moved back to Chicago I felt like the people were made of iron and I, from downstate, was made of a soft wood. 

One example I remember is that I got into a half empty el car and there was a young girl hanging onto a rail in the emptier part of the car.  It soon became apparent that it was emptier because most people had moved away from her because her clothes were in tatters, she was bruised and scratched, she was in a daze.  Maybe she was in need of help, maybe she was some crazy or druggy and if you reached out to her she would attack you somehow.  I think if she had asked for help people would have reached out, but she didn't.  Still I thought if this was in Champaign somebody would have done something.  There are a lot of good things about living in Chicago.  This is not one of them.


We did bring a lot of Vietnamese people to the USA.  Is Beagle's point that we should have brought more or that we should have stayed in Vietnam indefinitely?  It was hard times of our supporters  there but it was not certain death.  We have left a lot of interpreters for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq behind in part because of the anti Muslim immigration bans.  There are plenty of refugees in leaky boats, I hadn't realized that Beagles was for bringing them here.