Ankle Deep in humanity

    Many many years ago a friend told me there is no place in this world for sensitive people. Indeed the sensitive particularly suffer in this involuntary confusing journey. The problem is that in an insensitive world compassion, the very thing that surely binds the human race together, disappears. Compassion is bound up in 'doing the right thing' and sometimes in the flash of a second, anybody would do the right thing, when for instance a man is drowning?

     Many years ago I was in Australia swimming off the famous Bondi beach. I am not a strong swimmer and was being pulled under by dangerous rip currents only a few metres from the beach. Just as I was struggling to swim ashore I became aware of a man on his back fully clothed bobbing up and down in the water and purple looking (I am colour blind so thats what he looked like to me). He was basically drowning. Another swimmer and myself immediately went to his rescue. The other man, much younger and fitter than me (I was 43) attended to the drowning man in this dangerous water and yelled to me to get help so I swam using all my reserves to the beach, bobbing under as I did so. 

    Exhausted I managed to scream 'help, man drowning' and was just stared at by motionless beautiful people in the prime of their youth, beautifully tanned just sitting there in their vanity and doing absolutely nothing (this shock haunted me for years afterwards). However, quite quickly the rescue guys came in their red motorised rubber dinghy (or was it orange) and in the meantime the hero in this story had pulled the man on shore and gave him mouth-to-mouth. As the lifeguards took over and applied an oxygen mask to the nearly drowned man, his rescuer just quietly walked away, through the beautiful people just sitting there unaffected. I followed him and grabbed his arm  'Hey, you just saved that man's life - well done mate'.

    Back in Britain, in fact yesterday, I read in the newspaper a man had drowned in a boating pond as fire rescue officers stood and watched. They were not authorised to go into water more than ankle deep. A police officer was about to wade in but his superior fiercely reprimanded him apparantly. So the man drowned while our rescue services just stood and watched. He was trying to rescue a capsised model boat I think.  

Great - Britain!