If you’ve been looking for proof that we, as a global society, have fallen so far from the mark, failed so hard at both humanity and civility that something you might consider a small, common-sense act of kindness is currently making news around the world, then look no further.
Let’s face it, times are hard, not just around the nation but all over the world. The too-big-to-fail banks didn’t just rob America — they bled the whole damn world! The LIBOR scandal showed us all just one way the global class war has been rigged and enforced under the eyes and noses of the working class — that old-time proletariat. But regardless of the banks’ and the 1%’s black hole sucking up anything of value in the world out from under each and every one of us, one man in the Saudi city of Hail has found a small way to help the growing population of need widening across his community like the beak of a hungry nestling.
The anonymous “Good Samaritan” placed a refrigerator outside his house and urged neighbors to help fill it with food for the local needy. In that way, he told the Gulf News, those in need would be spared the “shame” of begging.
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The story caught the world’s eye after Sheikh Mohamad al-Arefe, a leading Saudi Muslim cleric, tweeted about the Samaritan.
I’ve always said the people of Hail are generous. A man puts a fridge outside his house for leftover food; an indirect act of charity for the needy. Oh how I love you, Hail!
According to Saudi news site Akhbar 24, Sheikh al-Arefe’s tweet was retweeted over 5,000 times. He currently has 8.6 million followers on the social media site. As a result, the virtual social-sphere is calling for mosques and additional households to follow suit. Some say even leaving fresh food rather than leftovers would be best, allowing for a “great act of charity” to “feed the soul” as Ramadan approaches in June.
And as the population of need grows right here in America, what a simple act of kindness this could be. To see communities open the wealth of their homes to those in need — from meager to great — would truly show the spirit of America and help restore some of our sorely lacking civility, if not our humanity. After all, survival of the fittest is for the wild, the primordial and savage.
Civilization is supposed to aim higher, to something resembling the word “civil.” But most likely, we suffer through our civil failures because of a fractured humanity. How to change ourselves, then, becomes the question. How to release the fear and step forward as the anonymous man from Hail? No — smart and simple as the man from Hail’s act is, for all the good it does, America is too fearful to be so daring.
We’re sue-crazy here — chocked to the brim with worries over hypothetical liabilities. We legislate away our humanity, even our civility, in the attempt to eradicate freak accidents when there is no hope of ever baby-proofing the world. Legislate all you want; people will still find ways to get hurt and die. In the middle are those who are tangled in bureaucracy and red tape, unable to feed the needy in their communities because the “fridge” they put out front might trap some kid who might suffocate to death, who might, who might…
Rather than teach kids to read, to stay out of strange, dark, enclosed places, to use a bit of thought and common sense, we legislate against economic liabilities — and the hungry stand in the rain, wondering if that rumble is thunder or something they used to call a stomach.
No, beautiful as the gesture is, you just won’t see this act catching on here in America. And that is what is popularly known as “a crying shame.”
H/T I Acknowledge Class Warfare Exists.
Dylan Hock is a writer, professor, videographer and social activist. He earned an MFA in Writing from Naropa University in 2003 and has been an Occupier since Oct., 2011, both nationally and locally in Michigan. He is published in a number of little magazines and has an essay on the muzzling of Ezra Pound included in the anthology Star Power: The Impact Of Branded Celebrity due out July of 2014 by Praeger. He is also a contributing writer for Take Ten, Addicting Info and Green Action News. Follow him on Google+!
