Really Now,

This is getting a bit ridiculous. A while back I posted about a little old lady that had been locked out of her house, and my disgust that so many people drove by without offering to help.

Today, I got another example of the tone our society has taken, right here at home.

This morning I was on my way to the Next Minuscule Town Over, when I saw a car on the side of the road. Nobody was in the car, so I figured they'd gotten a ride. That is, until I saw someone walking on the side of the road.

Now, out here, we've got several people who like to take walks, and the shoulder of the highway is a popular path, so I wasn't sure that it wasn't just someone out for a walk until I got even with them and realized that the person was walking with some difficulty and using a cane.

It was an older lady (about Mamaw's age, and she swears she's older than dirt) who had had a flat. She's from here in the county, and had left her cell phone at home on the charger, so she borrowed mine to call AAA.

This woman, (I found out a bit later) is scheduled for hip replacement surgery in the near future, and she had walked almost a quarter of a mile, slowly, from her bright red, sitting on the side of the road empty vehicle, with no one stopping. I know four cars passed by her while I was in sight but before I got to her.

In this day and age I can understand being cautious about picking up a large man or someone who might actually be able to... ya know... hurt someone.

But a sweet lady with personalized gramma license plates and a cane? Come on, people, that's just callous, and wrong.

It pains me to see such things here where I've always thought that the tradition of being neighborly, no matter how distant the neighbor, held true.

So, if any of you people are from my county, shape up! We're supposed to be the backbone of America, the simple, helpful, small town kind of folks, and we're getting farther away from that every year. I don't want pride in the community I live in to be a memory, I want it to be an active, growing thing.

And I by gawd don't want to read in the local paper about a little old lady that got run over on the highway because she had to walk to get help when she had a flat tire.