A RECENT incident has crushed what little faith I had in the goodwill of my fellow Londoners.
As I was walking to work, I saw a young woman fall off her bike right in the middle of an intersection.
It was peak hour, but fortunately, all the cars around her ground to a halt and she managed to get up and drag herself and her bike over to the footpath, near where I and several others happened to be walking.
Everyone stopped and watched but, sadly, I was the only one who approached her to see if she was okay.
Despite a few grazes and a seriously high level of embarrassment, the woman, who appeared to be in her late 20’s, was unharmed.
She was so grateful that I had approached her, while everyone else appeared not to care, and she thanked me more than once.
My first reaction was to find out if she was ok, because I know that if I was in her position, I would have wanted someone to do the same.
I know it’s not only Londoners who are too busy to stop and help others; Australia is even home to these sorts of heartless communities.
In fact, when I lived in Canberra several years ago, there was an incident at a bus stop outside a university where a woman had some kind of epileptic fit. Everyone ignored her because they thought she was on drugs, but she was in fact, a university lecturer.
I’m not going to harp on about today’s society and all that, because we’ve all heard it time and time before.
But seriously, something’s wrong when seeing an incident like that doesn’t bring people out of robot mode.
It’s time to start looking out for each other, London.
