Dear Humanity,
Please take a moment to put down your Starbucks coffee, your iPhone (or *gasp*, Blackberry) and your hand-held mirror, and use your now free hand to slap yourself in your self-absorbed face. Then, hop on a ferry and get the hell off your personal island, and realize that you, alone, are not the only person that matters. Relax, I took the ferry last night, it wasn't that bad - in fact, I feel great...aside from the now nagging sense of dissatisfaction with the world and those who inhabit it. Oh wait...yep, that was there before. It's okay, my hand-held mirror's probably just fogged up...
Don't get me wrong, I love a good, long personal island visit as much as the next gal, but there are limits to these sorts of indulgences, limits which prevent, for lack of a better word, chaos. I met my limit last night, and made an emergency ferry ride off the island, back to reality, where the world I live in is full of all kinds of shit. Love, hate, hurt, happiness, needs, hopes, fears and dreams.
I was on the bus, happily day-dreaming, or lamenting over something unimportant (it's usually one of those two things). I was standing near the back door, facing the front of the bus. On my way on, I noticed a few things: a lady sitting near the front, facing forward, asleep, with several bags piled onto the seat next to her, one man sitting across the aisle from her, also facing forward, and two woman sitting in front of her, facing inward. No one was talking to one another, they were all safe on their islands. As the bus started moving, I noticed from my back-of-the-bus vantage point that sleepy lady was falling off her chair. Not yet concerned, as I have on many occasions fallen asleep on the bus, I keep an eye on her, but don't move. Levels of "concern" at the front of the bus, however, were obviously higher, because one by one, the three non-sleepy passengers from the keener end of the bus move to seats toward the back, quite obviously escaping the inconvenience of having to look out for a fellow human. The lady is now hanging so far sideways off of her chair that her arm and pony-tail are dangling on the ground. Now, I don't want to claim I'm an expert on bus-sleeping, but...I am - and I know this is neither natural nor comfortable, because as soon as you start falling forward or sideways in bus-sleep, you wake up. (Digression: the head-bob, fallover-bus-wakeup is my favourite thing to witness....this wasn't that.) Alarm bells in my head. I bee-line to sleepy lady, who will now be referred to as passed-out lady, and pick her upper body up and reposition it into an upright position. She does not wake up, but seems to respond slightly to being re-positioned, as it wasn't that hard to move her. I stay there, wearily, as if she would wake up at any moment to find me staring intently at her while standing over her and she would find this very odd and creepy. But she's not about to wake up, she's falling over again and now I'm worried. I have made several observations in the meantime, and decide that the situation is serious. She is wearing a hospital bracelet, her arm is heavily bandaged, and she is not responding to me shaking her to wake her up. I prop her up, run to the bus driver to alert him whilst dialing 911, and run back to hold her up and check for breathing. The driver pulls over the bus, and at this point, and only at this point, someone else decides to help. I am receiving instructions from the paramedic that I can't carry out while holding the phone, so the help is needed. We have to lift this lady onto the ground and into the recovery position, and call for help, and in total, including myself, three people come to her aid. Three out of thirty, and it was with hesitance and reluctance that two of them helped. As I'm on the phone with the 911 operator, I take a quick scan of the people around me, and in the most appalling display of apathy and selfishness, a lady who had been sitting closest to passed-out lady actually signalled to me that I should hang up with 911, because the bus driver was on the phone with someone, he should deal with it. In her mind, not only should she have no part in this, but I shouldn't either - which made me so angry, but also so puzzled. How come this perfect stranger was more concerned about me being inconvenienced by having to call 911, than she was for the welfare of passed-out lady? She seemed disgusted that she was having any part of this ordeal, and was that look of disgust and attempt to dissuade me from calling 911 directed at me because she was being inconvenienced by all of this? Would she have rather that no one pay any attention to this lady, so that the bus could make its scheduled stops and she could go on with her extremely important Monday night? I was fairly certain that nothing that was happening right then and there on that woman's personal island was so goddamn important that it superseded the LIFE of another, but hey, that was just a guess on my part.
I have no time for this devil woman, as I am busy clearing airways and actually giving a shit.
Airway clear - check.
Breathing steady - check.
Paramedics en route - check.
Passed-out lady going to make it - check.
Bus full of total assholes - check.
The paramedics arrive and wade their way through the aforementioned assholes, and manage to regain the consciousness of passed-out lady, and carry her safely to the waiting ambulance. The bus, just as if nothing had happened, resumes it's route and no one says a word.
How is it that we have become so desensitized to humanity, that we are willing and able to ignore life happening around us? Life, living, surviving, BEING - what does it mean, if we are in it alone?
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