No One Would Help, Not Even With A Newspaper

The Story

It is strange how eye contact works differently in every country. But overall I think it is something that acknowledges another persons existence.

Once, there was this lady, let´s call her Lisa, who was walking home. She had to take the tube (“the subway”, but since this story takes place in London…) and then the bus to get back to her place. But this day she was with her baby girl who was asleep on the stroller. After exiting the tube with success, she had to take the bus to get home.

Meanwhile, a guy was on his way to the bus to go someplace that evening. He was under stress or in a hurry. Although that is non important. When he got to the bus stop there was Lisa and she was about to get on the bus, but this man tried to get in first. He could not even try to push, because she was already getting on board. So for unknown reasons this man got furious. It was really an over the top reaction to get for someone winning a place ahead on the bus.

So he started at first pushing Lisa, and then: there was eye contact. She saw him with stranged eyes, seeming not to understand what was just happening. She told off the man. But this turned out to be worse, due to the increasingly anger of that man. He started to scream at her, telling all kind of incorrect words to tell a mother when she is with her baby. No parent should be put to this.

She told him off, again. And started to look around for a sympathetic pair of eyes, but she could not found them. All she could see looked like this:

People reading the newspaper and the mobile thing-y of personal choice they carried. And the man started to kick the stroller with the baby on board.

This was it. This became that moment that if you have the chance to look, you get amazed by the natural-always-amazing instinct of a mother to protect her child. She took a deep breath, stared at him with eyes wide open and started to scream at him with a voice so loud and so intimidating, this man shut up for a moment, only to resume a seconds later. But he just wouldn’t shut up. Not even after she told him he had no right to do that.

She headed to the back of the bus and got down at the first stop she had a chance to. While she was descending, the bus driver saw her with accomplice-kind-of-eyes and she got to the sidewalk. The man followed her in what seemed a nut-case gone wrong attempt to prove a pointless point.

So again, she looked at him one last time and tried to get inside the same bus. At the entrance the driver acknowledged her when she asked him with calm voice “Could you do me the favor to not let that man on the bus again?”. She ascended and got to the same place as before, only this time there was silence. She observed the people on the bus again, and the image was the same. No one would even stop to look at her, to acknowledge her.

Everyone was reading the news. That seemed to be an attempt to get informed about the situation on the streets of London, the country, or the world. But no one would make eye contact.

Action and inaction

But why would they do that? Why do we get informed about what happens in the rest of the world? Some people can say that it is because they care about what happens. But, hell. What’s the point to learn about things if we cannot do anything with that information?

Paulo Freire is an amazing pedagogue from Brazil. And something I learned from reading his work (I highly recommend it) is that 1) Education is treated in a lot of places as alienated information (it should be treated as a mean to crack the code of reality) and 2) Education and reality are things that work together. If we learn something it affects our reality and when reality is somehow changed it affects the information we can learn. So the only way we can interact with reality is with action.

That is the big irony of this story. Everyone reading the newspaper: READING THE NEWS. But there was a breaking content right in front of them and no one would care to take a look at their own reality, not even to acknowledge that reality was shouting in front of them.

The only reality we’ve got is that. But no one would help to make it better, not even with a newspaper.