Offering a hand to have it bitten!

As many people who are reading this are, I am a member of Facebook, which is great for keeping in touch with old friends and relatives. For any of my relatives and friends who are reading this, I do not mean that you are old, well not all of you, but let's face it most of us are over 40 now.

One particular friend of mine posted a comment last night that made me really question the benefit of helping others and really bothered me to the point of wanting to explore her actions in print.

She is a childminder and found one of her ex-charges who had been with her for a long time, pleading with her after school. She was due to attend an after-school club but really did not want to go and would rather have gone home. She was begging to be taken home instead. My friend, who is one of the most caring I know and who has always loved the children that she cared for as her own, gave in and took her home.

These spur of the moment decisions can be made through the best of intentions and let's face it in that situation, how long can you deliberate? She was, however, greeted by an extremely annoyed mom, who grabbed the child and frog-marched her into the house without even giving my friend a second glance. A nice gesture goes up in flames.

The question is how would you have acted? Perhaps you had a serious piece of work that needed to be finished and the arrival of an eleven year old would have complicated that or you would have been grateful that your child was not left upset at the school and wanting to walk home on her own.

It is very difficult to do right sometimes. Should that really stop us trying to do anything? I think of the example recently of the man that was left to die in the street for two hours with people just walking past him. This prompted a radio programme to reveal that many people had actually been left lying on a street, trying to avoid people stepping on them. How can we have become a society when people are so scared to act? The case of the baby left on the beach to burn and the interference that followed also raised alarm bells. Should the mother have been interfered with or should the baby have been left to become badly injured because people do not like to get involved?

The answer is many people do whatever they believe is right at the time. When my father was a boy, the whole street would interfere in the upbringing of kids and he would quite happily have received a meal from any of his neighbours. Have we gone too far due to the problems of CRB checks, ambulance chases and press coverage of such issues? Let's hope there are still some decent people out there who are prepared to take action for the right reasons.