Do You Care About Other Human Beings?

Do You Care About Other Human Beings?

The typical customary rhetoric is the genocide in Rwanda was a sudden catastrophe beginning with the president being murdered in an airplane crash on April 6, 1994.  The United Nations General in charge made it very clear the build up to the massacre was apparent long before the plane crashed. The General had been warning everyone at the United Nations and leaders around the world of the imminent bloodshed.  He was pleading and calling for more troops and supplies.  He needed solders and equipment. The United Nations failed to help and blocked the attempts to build an effective force. The historical record shows the United Nations’ failure in Rwanda to hear the plea for aid against the moral cowardice that allowed the genocide. Humanity failed Rwanda.

It was a routine admission to Bellevue Hospital on a cold windy dreary morning in New York in January 1864. Just another drunken bum with a slashed throat from the Bowery on his way to the morgue.  The bum’s name was misspelled on the form.  His age was also incorrect. He was 38 not 39. Maybe someone thought, “He was so young”.  No body cared so nothing was said. 

He was brought into the hospital struggling for life but he died later and was delivered to the morgue where a friend found him and properly identified him.  Among his few personal belongings was found 38 cents and a scrap of paper with the following words, “Dear friends and gentle hearts”. If you are thinking that sounds like words to a song.  You are correct. In fact, the dead man wrote more than two hundred songs about our rich American heritage.  His name was Stephen Collins Foster, one of our most influential songwriters. Someone finally stepped up with love compassion and cared for a lost soul.

In these turbulent times, some of these lost souls are in hospitals, in prison, in drug and alcohol rehabilitation, and some are confused, uncertain of their future and fearful.  Do you care enough to be hospitable, kind, considerate, and find out by listening to their story?  Zig Ziglar said, “People do not care how much you know until they know how much you care about them.”