We Are All Broken in A Way, and we Need the Human Side.
A few days ago I witnessed a certain incident that left me thinking for some time now. It was about 8 p.m. and I was making the last stretch towards reaching my house. By the roadside was this young lady, she could be around 18 years, who was on a wheel chair. She was struggling to push herself across the road at a dangerous spot in a roundabout. I feared for her life after witnessing a Public Service Vehicle (PSV) swerve very close to her.
Luckily enough a policeman in uniform manning the traffic on the roundabout noticed the incident and moved to her rescue. I could hear him asking the lady where she was going. In no time the cop removed his cap and placed it on the physically challenged lady’s lap together with the rod they usually carry. He then went ahead to push the wheelchair to the other side of the road where she was headed.
It surprised me further that even as he pushed her across the road, some vehicles from the moving side never cared to allow him pass. He had to beckon a fellow police officer manning another side of the roundabout to come and stop the vehicles, most of them PSVs, scrambling to make the turn before the dreadful hand of the police could stop them.
I am specific about the word PSVs because as I noticed, the majority of them didn’t really care to stand save for a majority of the personal vehicles that offered to stop. I have seen time and again the way those vehicles are driven on our roads and all I can do is gasp and offer way.
That act by this policeman touched me. I contemplated of the other side of our men in the uniform. That despite the hard and challenging environment of their operations and even their living places, he went ahead to help the young lady.
I am sure that a lot of other pedestrians had seen this woman struggling all by herself and as it seems, none of them cared. Not even one was humane enough. It was only this man, a father, a husband, a security officer and most importantly a good neighbor that exercised his human side. That of loving our neighbor and doing unto them as we could desire it to be done to us.
For the next few days, I really kept thinking about how we perceive brokenness. And let me be categorical here that what I mean by brokenness is not financial scarcity or deficit. I mean the aspect of fracture. Separating into pieces. That appearance of incompleteness. Let us agree that we have had it wrong by thinking of incompleteness physically when talking of the people with special needs. To me I believe it goes beyond that.
Let us come to think of it this way, that just like a computer, we too as a people have the physical challenges which could equate to hardware. Then there is the part of humanity that entails mannerisms, character and values. This is the equivalence of software to the computer. The software and hardware make a complete computer. And like a computer, we too need to have completeness as a whole and not in part.
Uniquely enough, majority of us talk of humanity as an aspect of the physical only. We never appreciate that there is the moral section that most of us have challenges with and we don’t even know. Like the case of the tens of people who had passed by without offering a hand of help to the lady on a wheelchair, in a dangerous position and in need of help.
When the millions of us who are physically well appreciate that we are all broken in a way, abstract though, then we can begin to be human. A society that can be described as a man eat man society automatically cannot have humanity credited to them. The brokenness here promiscuously becomes abstract as opposed to physical. It is this type that we need to be careful with since it needs an inner eye to unravel.
It is time we needed to start appreciating that yes, we are all broken in one way or another. It could be in habits, character, value and mannerisms. Only then can we rectify our inhumane actions and let our human side mask them. If we can succeed in fixing this, incidences like that of our heroic policeman will start becoming common.
Let us put our problems aside once in a while and offer the so much needed help. It is not all help that is often financial. To be able to help; heal from the past, avoid generalization as well as comparisons and believe divinely that by offering that help where genuinely needed becomes a thing people will identify you with for ages to come.
Perhaps we can change our stories too like the one for this police officer. And we can all agree that even in brokenness, humanity ought to take precedence.
End
Copyright @ 2018.
