Driving Kindness

Yesterday, I was in the car with my driving instructor trying to finish up my driving lessons.  The objective of that lesson was parking uphill and downhill so he had me drive to downtown where there were more uphills and downhills instead of just flat land. When I was parking uphill near the sidewalk, Mr. R, the driving instructor, saw what looked like someone or something near the turn on the sidewalk up ahead.  Mr. R asked me if it looked like a person and I said I didn’t know because to me it honestly just looked like a giant turtle. (It was a person; I just mistook the green backpack as a shell.) At first, Mr. R felt a bit concerned but then he felt even more so when some guy biked up near the sleeping guy and just loitered. Mr. R expressed his concerns that the biker was going to mug the sleeping person so I suggested we pull up next to them and check out what’s up. Mr. R had me drive up to them and roll down the windows and he started talking to the guy on the bike who explained that the sleeping guy was his friend who got punched last night and biker had was there to make sure his friend was okay. When Mr. R offered to call the police to get the guy help, biker even woke and dragged up his friend to show that his friend was in fact okay. Once reassured, Mr. R and I went on our way.

                Because of that incident, my respect for Mr. R shot through the roof. Not many people would go out of their way to be concerned with the well beings of strangers.  To be honest, if it was just me in the car, I wouldn’t have paid enough attention to realize that the “giant turtle” was in fact a sleeping man who could’ve gotten mugged. I live near Chicago and I used to go there a lot because I had an internship there. I would always see a lot of homeless people and everyone else would just avert their eyes and do their best to ignore the homeless people.  I really wanted to give them money but I didn’t have any. I can only imagine how hard it would be to be homeless and on top of that treated like shit by everyone else. I remember reading an article about homeless people and people commented really rude comments on how homeless people were lazy and didn’t try and how a lot of homeless people weren’t actually homeless and just wanted people to give them money. It broke my heart.

                My school is full of really smart and successful people, but when I think about it, I can’t imagine any of them being so caring to strangers. In fact, I feel that some of them definitely look down to people not as successful as them. That just shows that success isn’t a measure of kindness and some of the kindest people aren’t the most successful in the conventional sort of way.

                When we were driving back, we needed to get gas so Mr. R had me drive to the second gas pump instead of the first so we could leave the first for someone else who needed use it instead of blocking the pump. Even though Mr. R is picky about my driving, I still respect and admire him for being such a kind person!