Good deeds.

Good people are hard to come by. It seems that the growing number of people that are born into this world is inversely proportional to the will to do good for those people around us. Maybe there is only a certain amount of common good that exists. As more people are born, the common good keeps getting stretched thinner and thinner, until at some point, it'll snap. People will start killing one another just because they are having a bad day. It seems as though we are pretty close to getting there already.

I hope that this is just a pessimistic hypothesis that doesn't prove true. In fact, this thought process began as a moment of introspection about my feelings towards everyone that exists around me. I admit, I have, on more than a few occasions, thought that it wouldn't be half bad if most of the population was obliterated by a pandemic that I and a few of my close friends and family happened to have an immunity against. Or perhaps, just a simple natural disaster that would eat up several million people. I don't think it's a necessarily evil thought process, just a natural human response when sitting in Los Angeles rush hour traffic, wondering when the hell all these people start existing? But then again, as the Bible describes humanity as inherently sinful, my thoughts may have not exactly been influenced by a Godly point of view.

BE THAT AS IT MAY, it's tough to keep doing what would be considered good deeds, just because of the fact that there are so many people. If you spent your day trying to do good for everyone around you, you would have no time, energy, or money left to do anything. You might think I'm rationalizing the situation, but try driving out to Westwood, Los Angeles, and see if you don't get tired of handing out change to the endless stream of homeless people that are asking for money. I see the same people every day, at least three per block, and I get to thinking that I might need to keep some change for myself to pay for parking meters! Is that just selfishness? Or maybe it has gotten to a point where we all have started to avoid good deeds because it precipitates a snowball effect, and it's terrifying to know where that ball will stop. Maybe when we all have nothing more to give to anyone, and that prospect is a little scary.

I admit, it's gotten to a point in my life where I DO ignore people around me, just in case they might ask me for stuff, or ask me to do something for them. To balance it out, if there are things that can be done I do it; Doors held open (elevators are exempt, because it's fun to fuck with people and "hold the door" even when you're really pressing the closed button), helping people pick up dropped items, letting the occasional idiotic motorist merge into the lane in front of me.

And sometimes, the demand for a kind act is just thrust upon you. Today, I was dropping off my nieces at their respective schools. That alone right there was a kind act, because those two can be a handful, especially when I'm not fully awake to deal with their BS. As I was leaving to come home, a barefoot girl came running up hysterically, screaming for someone to help. As I was the only person around for a block, she addressed me telling me that someone had forced her into a bad car accident and had driven off. She was chasing down this car barefoot.

My car was parked about ten feet away, so I offered to help. She jumps into my car, and I'm still wondering what the hell I'm doing. It was all so sudden, I didn't have the time to think about all the terrible things I could potentially be getting myself into. Murder, rape, espionage, and general mayhem now that I think about it. Anyway, I was driving her after this car. Seeing as how the girl just got into a car accident, I did my best to drive quickly, seasoned with a dose of extreme caution.

As it turns, out, the culprit of the accident was an older asian man wearing glasses. We got his license plate number and headed back to the scene of the accident. Right before we rounded the corner, I saw smoke rising up through the trees and I remember thinking, there's no way that's from her car. Boy was I wrong. Her car was perpendicular to the road, on the opposite side of the street where she had been driving, impaled on a tree, with flames licking the ground from under her engine. This hysterical girl jumps into her FLAMING car to save some of her belongings.

The girl eventually found some shoes. I stayed a while longer to make sure she was okay, talked to the police, then came home. All this had happened before 9AM PST. What a crazy way to start the morning. The kicker of it was that this situation couldn't have been executed better had it been scripted. The way these random events seem to happen to me makes me wonder. Does the consciousness I have of my actions and purpose create a whirlpool effect, thereby forcing situations where I have to make quick, not-very-well-thought-out decisions that might help to make things a little better? Maybe so.

All this leads me to believe that if everyone had a sort of introspective outlook on life around them, the common good could recover a little. If we contributed a little awareness to it, we would cease to strain it, and help it to grow a little bit.

And the occasional negative thoughts we have when we get cranky, that's only human reaction. If we choose not to give into it, I think we could all make things a bit more bearable on these crowded streets.