Basic Human Decency Should Not Be “Extra”

I recently was on an onsite client trip. While this was a weekly occurrence before the pandemic, it’s now much more infrequent. The normal rhythms of my travel routines have long been forgotten. I’m just re-discovering them. Part of that is looking around and realizing that on airplanes, getting my rental car, and checking into my hotel, people are so disconnected about what’s going on around them. I’m probably at the top of that list because I’m so focused, in the end, on just trying to get home.

My focus on myself and getting home was completely derailed getting off a plane in Denver. I needed to make my connection in about an hour, not having to go too many gates away, and was thinking about the great joy of getting home within the next 90 minutes or so when I turn the corner on the jet bridge coming off of the flight and found a man prone on the floor passed out. He was accompanied by his wife and two of their best friends. I eventually learned that they were from a community not far from Denver and that he had his own insurance agency specializing in corporate health care. All of that’s not very relevant to the troubling episode.

I was the seventh or eighth person off the plane with as many as 100 people following me. When I came across the gentleman, I stopped and tried to offer some assistance. I was able to get him sitting up and convinced him not to try to stand up until we got some medical assistance. Nothing I did was that big of a deal. But what was bothersome was that not one additional person coming off that airplane bothered to offer any assistance. And as I was focused on him, I kept expecting someone to tap me on the shoulder and say, “do you need any help?”  Nobody did that. It wasn’t until the pilots and the flight attendants came around the corner, having done their final checks of the plane, until someone, almost all of them at once, asked if we needed some help. I looked up for the first time and said that we did and that no one had done anything. The pilot ran up and grabbed the gate agent, who called the paramedics, who then arrived to take care of the gentleman.

This is not a story of me stopping to assist…I really did not do that much. This isn’t anything that I did that was magnanimous. It’s really a story of disappointment. In the crazy world where we become more independent based on a pandemic, how can so many people walk right past me and in need? How is that possible? Why wouldn’t at least one or two additional people stop and ask if everything was OK? It’s been several days since this episode and life as continued to move on, but I’m still bothered by it. Basic human decency and assistance shouldn’t be an extra effort, it should be a part of our basic human fabric.